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OTHER BOOKS BY 
DR. KELLEY 

With the Children: In Lewis 
Carroirs Company 

The Ripening Experience of Life 

A Pilgrim of the Infinite 

A Salute to the Valiant 

The Illumined Face 

Down the Road 

Trees and Men 



The Open Fire 

And Other Essays 

By 
WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY 



I have warmed both hands before the fire of 
life, and now am sitting by the glowing embers 




THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



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Copyright, 1922, by 
WILLIAM VALENTINE KELLEY 



Printed in the United States of America { 



g)(il.^/lV5 9822 



To 

Wesleyan University 

My 

Alma Mater 

AND 

To MY brethren in the ministry, 

PARTICULARLY TO MY COMRADES OF 
FORTY YEARS IN THE NEW YORK 
EAST CONFERENCE, A BODY IN 
WHICH, WHEN THE BEST MAN DOES 
HIS BEST, HE ONLY PROVES HIMSELF 
WORTHY OF HIS ASSOCIATIONS 



CONTENTS 

PAOB 

Introduction 9 

The Open Fire: A Reverie 11 

Visible Values in Robert Browning 50 

The Double Sky 94 

Matthew Arnold's Apostolate 131 

Glimpses of the Soul of Gilder 188 

The Woods and the Inn 217 

Some Newspaper Verse 244 

Christina Rossetti's Devotional Prose 258 

The Voluminous Unimportance of Positivism 272 
The Vogue and Versatility of Wonderland 

Alice 281 

Vagabond Echoes 294 

Beating the Drum of Eternity 304 

A Veteran Missionary 320 

Humility 330 



INTKODUCTION 

The introduction is an anomaly ; written last 
it is placed first — afterthought posing as fore- 
thought. 

It is sometimes the author's hete noire^ a cause 
of perplexity. Who shall write it? If the 
author, what shall he say about his own book? 
For him to commend it would be unseemly: 
"Let another man praise thee and not thine own 
mouth.'' To apologize for it would be humil- 
iating and self-stultifying, for if it needs 
apology or defense, why does he publish it? Be- 
sides, the critics — if any notice the book — will 
save him the trouble of pointing out its faults 
and deficiencies. If the author avoids his di- 
lemma by asking a friend to write the intro- 
duction, he may be laying an unwelcome burden 
on an innocent person, too polite to decline. 
And, if a book is bold enough to brave the perils 
of print, ought it not to have the courage to face 
publicity without usher or chaperon? 

Unless an introduction explains or refers to 
the book's insides, the name is a misnomer ; it is 
not, properly speaking, an introduction. Yet even 
Edmund C. Stedman's socalled introduction to 
one of his own books makes no reference to 
what follows, and is, in reality, a separate essay 
on a different subject and might as properly 

9 



10 INTRODUCTION 

appear at the end as at the beginning of the 
volume. 

Responsibility for the publication of this book 
rests with those who have requested it, and with 
the great Publishing House which, in the one 
hundred and thirty-third year of its increasingly 
prosperous existence and ever- widening influence, 
takes the risk of offering to its vast public The 
Open Fire And Other Essays. 

If, in deference to custom, a preface is ex- 
pected, then, in order that this may have the sem- 
blance of an introduction, by making some refer- 
ence to the contents, the author ventures to re- 
mark that these essays have some range and 
variety of theme, and to say that they are written 
in the spirit of Browning's lines : 

"This world's no blot or blank; 
It means intensely and means good. 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink." 



THE OPEN FIEE : A EEVERIE 

"The open fire is a primitive, elemental thing; 
it is a bit of the red heart of nature laid bare ; it 
is a dragon of the prime docile and friendly there 
in the corner. What pictures! what activity! 
how social ! You are not permitted to forget it 
for a moment. How it responds when you nudge 
it. How it rejoices when you feed it. Why, an 
open fire in your room is a whole literature. It 
supplements your library as nothing else in the 
room does or can." 

Not a poetic Burroughs rhapsody, this, but de- 
scription fairly scientific and verified by com- 
mon experience. "A primitive and elemental 
thing," wrote the master of Slabsides, well ac- 
quainted with the elements. And so it is: the 
subtle, mysterious, mesmeric spell of the open 
fire is elemental, like to those which winds and 
waters cast over human sensitivity — as witching 
and irresistible as they are inexplicable. The 
four elements the ancients knew were earth, air, 
water, fire. All these have the call on man. His 
sensibilities lie open to them. Their touch noti- 
fies him that at least the fringes of his constitu- 
tion are interwoven with the world, and that to 
the powers called Nature his kinship is close and 
his subjection sure. Physically, they own him, 

11 



12 THE OPEN FIRE 

and at any moment may take possession. The 
cosmic tides wash all his coasts and flush all his 
inlets. 

Exceptionally sensitive to all things elemental 
was the emotional nature of Robert Burns, who 
said that the influence which most exalted and 
enraptured him was that of a stormy wind howl- 
ing among the trees and raging over the plains. 
And the sound of moving air is one of the stirring 
elemental voices, whether whispering in the silky 
grass, or rustling leafy branches, or solemnizing 
the pine forest with a sonorous chant, or roaring 
in wild tempests across the somber sky. 

Equally potent with the voices of the winds 
are the voices of the waters in the elemental 
spell they cast over human kind, as in the rhyth- 
mic booming of the breakers on the beach or the 
cannonading of great waves against the cliff, or 
the sibilance of receding wavelets smoothing out 
the seaside sands. Bishop Warren could remem- 
ber that during weeks of tramping and climb- 
ing in the high Alps, he and his friend fell asleep 
each night within hearing of the hoarse roar or 
muffled thunder of some cataract or mountain 
torrent, and found it like a wild, but soothing lul- 
laby sung by Mother Nature to her tired chil- 
dren. Gilbert White, the naturalist, fabled how 
a young tortoise went abroad and kept a diary 
of his travels. The pleasantest recollection re- 
corded in the hard-shell tourist^s notes of a sea 
voyage was that "the rippling of the water 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 13 

against the sides of our vessel as we sailed along 
was a very lulling and composing sound to go to 
sleep by.'' An instinctive wisdom, reenforced by 
experience, led the Cistercian monks to locate 
their monasteries by the sounding side of run- 
ning water in secluded valleys, and to inscribe 
upon the inner walls a sentiment from Bernard 
of Clairvaux, which Wordsworth rendered into 
English : 

"Here Man more purely lives, less oft doth fall, 
More promptly rises, walks with stricter heed. 
More safely rests, dies happier, is freed 
Earlier from cleansing fires, and gains withal 
A brighter crown." 

We all understand Coleridge in the "Ancient 
Mariner" when he tells of mysterious music in 
the rigging and says that the sails 

". . . made on 
A pleasant noise till noon, 
A noise like of a hidden brook 
In the leafy month of June, 
That to the sleeping woods all night 
Singeth a quiet tune"; 

and we understand Browning's picture in "Saul" 
of the channel where "the water was wont to go 
warbling so softly and well." 

Most of us have a brook flowing through the 
green fields of memory. There is a New Jersey 
brook which forever makes music to the man 
who is pushing this pen. Often he hears it flow- 
ing through the middle of the night. To him 



14 THE OPEN FIRE 

"Stony Brook" is not a silent stream slow-mov- 
ing toward Raritan River. Tinkling over its 
pebbly bed through its earliest stages and his, 
it sings of a friendship which began on its grassy 
and wild-flowered banks in the far-away meadows 
of boyhood. That little stream runs through his 
very soul, and seems to empty far on into the 
River of Life which Saint John saw in his celes- 
tial vision, into the actual glory prefigured by 
which vision the comrade of Stony Brook disap- 
peared one wild March morning when the angels 
called his soul. And mention was made of Stony 
Brook between those two men, boys together for 
fifty-four years, when one of them lay dying at 
the age of sixty-seven. 

Le Gallienne, defending Walter Pater's liter- 
ary style from the charge of artificiality, pre- 
ciosity, and excessive ornamentation, speaks of 
Pater's sincerity as seen in many passages of 
delicious simplicity, fresh country vistas, and 
pictures of primitive color, all full of verisimili- 
tude and of truth told with delicate fidelity. Le 
Gallienne says that in Pater's pages, among the 
rich colors, exquisite odors, sweet music, and 
shapely forms of his literary artistry, we find 
three things — reverence, reality, and purity ; and 
all through Pater's writings, the soul, in its wan- 
derings, is healthily aware of heaven and earth, 
"never strays out of sight of the white temples 
of the gods nor out of hearing of the sound of 
running water." Contact with the elements is 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 15 

favorable to normality and balance. "Heaven 
and earth from my window," exclaimed a grate- 
ful woman, glad for her new sight of them, as she 
gazed out on the wondrous beauty of the October 
world from her fourth-story Clifton Springs 
room, to which she had just been brought back 
convalescent from the surgical ward. Health 
coincided with ecstasy at the sight of heaven 
and earth. Heaven and earth, temples of wor- 
ship and running brooks, altar fires and hearth 
fires — all of them elemental things — are alike 
essential in literature and in life, to health, 
sanity, normality, and poise. The condemna- 
tion and the ruin of much modern life — social, 
commercial, aesthetic — is that it is so far from the 
healthful and the sacred, from the running 
brooks and white temples, and the things they 
signify, and in consequence, is so artificial, so 
false, so godless, so vicious, so rotten. 

Because the spell of the open fire, like the 
voice of winds and the voice of many waters, is 
primal and elemental, as the Master of Slabsides 
and of Woodchuck Lodge remarks, therefore it 
also has easy access to what is primitive and ele- 
mental in man. Sidney Lanier held two things 
necessary to the making of a home — an open fire 
and music; two things which are alike in this, 
that all can feel their magic spell, but none ex- 
plain or translate it distinctly into language. 
Emerson said, "My idea of a home is a house in 
which each member of the family can on the in- 



16 THE OPEN FIRE 

stant kindle an open fire in his or her private 
room.'' A Baltimore professor of literature, feel- 
ing his home to be now for the first time really 
complete, diverts a lecturer from the bee line 
between train and lecture platform, apparently 
to show the passer-by a new fireplace just built 
into his library, over which the man of letters 
seemed happier than a child with a new toy, or 
a millionaire with a new yacht, or a spendthrift 
with a new automobile which he has mortgaged 
his house to purchase. That doughty veteran 
General Simon Bolivar Buckner boasted of his 
century-old log cabin, his birthplace and latest 
residence, because every room has a big fireplace 
where they can ^^bake apples, pop corn, roast 
game, and make hot drinks." Not for Elihu 
Root's twenty-five-thousand-dollar a year steam- 
heated apartment in a Fifth Avenue flat house 
in Gotham would the proud old "Johnnie Reb" 
exchange his clay plastered house of logs with 
its blazing open fires. A famous editor named 
Buckley, planning his house to suit himself, 
built it in the hill country of northern New Jer- 
sey, with fifty-eight windows and eight open fire- 
places, to insure plenty of light, ventilation, and 
cheeriness. For Elizabeth Hamilton the splen- 
dor of palaces has no sight so delightful as "the 
bonnie blithe blink o' her ain fireside." T. A. 
Daly, the laureate of Little Italy, informs us in 
verse that he has bought an old colonial fireplace, 
and invites us all to come and enjoy it with him 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 17 

so soon as he can find the wherewithal to build 
a house around it. 

Take away the word "fireside," with all that it 
connotes and suggests, and you have done much 
to rob life of meaning, sanctity, and desirability. 
The hearth fire is the emblem, synonym, and 
acme of domesticity. That erudite instructor. 
Etymology, informs us that the fireplace is, in 
Latin, literally the "focus" of the house; upon 
which definite experience and the dictionary are 
agreed. It is the point at which the life of the 
home concenters and confers. Only the dining- 
room table matches it in power to assemble the 
family. About it, at the day's close, the genera- 
tions gather as David's flock came, one by one, 
to the sheepfold when he played the tune all the 
sheep knew. 

Even a sight of the fire warms the imagination. 
Rufus Choate, one of the greatest advocates of all 
time, his mind saturated with the Bible, came 
into the Crawford House in the White Moun- 
tains one day, cold and shivering. The instant 
he caught sight of the blaze in the great fire- 
place he felt warm, even before the heat-rays 
could reach him, and he exclaimed, "Do you re- 
member that verse in Isaiah, ^Aha, I am warm. 
I have seen the fire' ?" 

Is an open fire one of the "Aids to Reflection" 
not found in Coleridge's great book? Is the com- 
bustion of logs on the hearth conducive to the 
combustion of phosphorus in the brain? When 



18 THE OPEN FIRE 

an ingenious real estate promoter in the forest 
sections of Greater New York city, yearning to 
bless mankind and parenthetically to promote 
his own enterprise, hit upon the novel expedient 
of opening a Thinking Resort, he did it by con- 
structing a huge fireplace and chimney, around 
which a Virginia negro, who knew how, built for 
him from the woods of Emerson Hills a very 
large log cabin, w^hich is dignified with the name 
of ^Thilosopher's Retreat," and is offered as a 
quiet refuge for pestered and distracted thinkers, 
w^ho are invited from near and far to come and 
enjoy a season of meditation in the peaceful com- 
fort of that big log fire, which is relied upon to 
produce a superior quality of thinking, already 
in great demand and as sure to appreciate in 
value as are eligible corner lots in the promised 
course of boom-town events. This Philosopher's 
Retreat, erected out of real estate profits, is dedi- 
cated to the use of ^'lovers of nature, statesmen 
with political futures before them or behind 
them; for those wishing to reflect on the grati- 
tude of future generations or the ingratitude of 
present and past generations; for philosophers, 
born as such or grown to be such by the trials 
of professional, social, commercial, or political 
strife." Such is one practical philanthropist's 
contribution to the promotion of deep thinking in 
America, and incidentally to the fine art of ad- 
vertising. No crusty old unphilosophical cur- 
mudgeon growling outside the Staten Island log 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 19 

cabin and repeating sarcastically the childish 
drama which began, "Will you walk into my par- 
lor? said the spider to the fly," can prevent us 
from using the incident to emphasize, or at least 
to query, the intellectual value of the open fire. 
So great a body as the Association of Arts and 
Sciences has been seen in session in that Phil- 
osopher's Retreat, knitting its high brow and 
trying to think with the aid of a roaring fire, 
which is not so absurd as the unscientific might 
suppose. One man sat before an open fire shortly 
after reading the newest conception of matter. 
He was meditating on the marvels brought to 
mental view by the atomic theory; he was con- 
sidering what vast subrealms of the infinitely 
minute are revealed by the microscope or inferred 
by science. While meditating thus and watch- 
ing the sparks go up the chimney-throat, his sci- 
entific imagination sees submicroscopic atomic 
systems — galaxies whirling inside each tiny 
spark that floats upward on the chimney draught. 
This scientific vision of the infinitely small below 
him, added to his knowledge of the infinitely 
large above, made one watcher of an open fire 
realize himself to be a creature placed midway 
between the infinite and the infinitesimal in this 
astounding universe; the most amazing and im- 
mensely significant fact being that he finds him- 
self to be an incurably curious and considerably 
competent observer of it all, having by his very 
constitution a search warrant to explore, and 



20 THE OPEN FIRE 

ability to take knowledge of both the bottomless 
abyss and the topless empyrean, his mind so near 
akin to the Intelligence seen at work in all the 
universe that he is capable of thinking God's 
thoughts after him, as Kepler said with awe- 
struck ecstasy and adoring love. Such cosmic 
reflections as these were suggested and verified 
by an open fire. The human sense of kinship 
with the infinite overhead is uniquely expressed 
by Angela Morgan in verses read before the 
Poetry Society of America: 

"I am aware. 

As I sit quietly here in my chair, 

Sewing or reading or hraiding my hair, 
I am aware of the systems that swing 
Through the aisles of creation on heavenly wing — 
I am aware of a marvelous thing. 

Trail of the comets in furious flight, 

Thunders of beauty that shatter the night. 
Terrible triumph of pageants that march 
To the trumpets of time through Eternity's arch. 

I am aware of the splendor that ties 

All the things of the earth with the things of the skies. 
Here in my body the heavenly heat, 
Here in my veins the melodious beat 
Of the planets that circle Divinity's feet. 

As I sit silently here in my chair, 
I am aware." 

As to the productive value of thinking anywhere, 
it seems, like everything else, to be in dispute. 
Voltaire had hope for the world when it shall 
have learned how to think. Montesquieu believed 
that the world is to be redeemed by men who 



THE OPEN FIRE : A REVERIE 21 

think. But a nineteenth-century sage said, "Be- 
ware when the Almighty lets loose a thinker on 
this planet, for then all things are at risk'' ; and 
a poet says that "thinking makes one old"; and 
now comes Anatole France gravely warning us 
that thinking is the most dangerous of occupa- 
tions, and if indulged in too freely will break up 
the world. And there we are. To think or not 
to think, that is the question. At this point we 
overhear the dialogue between the owl and the 
cat. The cat went to the owl to find out how to 
be happy. The owl said: "My opinion is, cat, 
that the only thing that is necessary is to think, 
think profoundly and deeply upon some philo- 
sophical question." 

But the cat said, "What shall I think 
about?" 

"O, it isn't so much the question you think 
of as the thinking, the mental exercise, that will 
give you peace. But this is a good question: 
The owl came from the egg, and the egg comes 
from the owl — now, which was first?' " 

The cat thought a moment, then said, "How 
am I going to settle the question?" 

"Why, my friend, you can't settle it, and that 
is the beauty of the question. If you could, it 
would end all your thinking." 

To get happiness out of the insolubility of life's 
problems seems a bright idea, and may be the 
part of wisdom. Philosophy, like the colored 
preacher, sometimes attempts to "explain de 



22 THE OPEN FIRE 

unexplainable and unscrew de unscrntable ;" and 
if thinking on insoluble questions can insure 
happiness, "I'm sure we should all be as happy 
as kings/' since "the world is so full of a number 
of things" which philosophy, like science, cannot 
explain. 

Whether sitting by an open fire is usually con- 
ducive to much thinking may be doubted. Hud- 
son Maxim describes a husky laborer coming in 
from his day's work, appeasing his fierce hunger 
with a. homely meal, and then humping himself 
up in the chimney corner, contentedly smoking 
his peaceful pipe, while the good wife cautions 
the children not to disturb father, because he is 
in a brown study. And when one little urchin 
approaches and says, "Papa, w^hat are you do- 
ing?" the answer he gets is, "O, I'm just think- 
ing." Mr. Maxim says the tired man is not 
thinking at all ; he is just luxuriating in the com- 
fort of merely feeling; or, in stately scientific 
language, "He is enjoying the goings-on of his 
reflex processes. Thinking would be an effort. 
Therefore he has inhibited from action and con- 
sciousness as many of the higher thought-centers 
as possible, consistent with a waking state." The 
consensus of experienced observers is that strenu- 
ous and resultful cerebration is not the usual 
effect of the open fire on the human constitution. 
Probably it was not w hile sitting in an easy-chair 
before the fire, pervaded by a blissful sense of 
physical Men etre, that Gutenberg thought out 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 23 

his printing press, or Stevenson his locomotive, 
or Fulton his steamboat, or Morse his telegraph, 
or Howe his sewing machine, or McCormick his 
reaper, or Bell his telephone, or Edison his pho- 
nograph and incandescent light, or any of his 
thousand inventions. 

To be sure, Hopkinson Smith pretends that 
while seated "In the Arm Chair at the Inn"— 
the old inn of William the Conqueror on the Nor- 
mandy coast — before the fire, he overheard in his 
mind a sculptor, a painter, an architect, an en- 
gineer, a writer, and various other friends en- 
gaged in a brilliant discussion of art, literature, 
love, and other things, covering almost the whole 
philosophy of life. But as this Mr. Smith is a 
professional romancer who prints books for pelf, 
a very imaginative and fictional gentleman, it 
is permissible for us to doubt whether it really 
was while luxuriating in the relaxing self-indul- 
gence of an easy-chair before the fire that his 
superactive brain evolved the philosophies and 
tender romances and thrilling adventures con- 
tained in his latest book. Jowett of Balliol, 
when asked what he had been thinking about 
while silently gazing long and steadily into the 
fire with the look of a man completely lost in 
profound thought, replied, "The fact is I was not 
thinking of anything." The great Greek profes- 
sor was one with the farmer who, being asked 
what he did in winter, answered, "Sometimes I 
sets and thinks, and sometimes I just sets." 



24 THE OPEN FIRE 

One man who found fireside thinking and study 
futile envied his drowsing dog : 

"He lay in dreamland, one side of the hearth, 
And I, in books a-browsing, at the other. 
No question dimmed my clear philosophy. 
I knew I knew I knew. 
But as I read from misty Thales onward — 
Learning what learned men have thought of thought — 
I lost my way (while still my spaniel slumbered) 
In Plato's tangle, Aristotle's too; 
While still my spaniel innocently slumbered, 
I knew I thought I knew. 
Along the years from Eckhart to Spinoza. 
Through Leibnitz, Locke, and others worse by far, 
I groped my way (while still my spaniel slumbered) ; 
I thought I thought I knew. 
The German giants led me in a flounder 
Through depths of dim epistemology; 
I wriggled on, until at last it ended. 
I knew that nought I knew. 

Then rose my spaniel fresh from blissful slumber, 
As blithe as any great Galileo — 
He shook his hide, yawning a yawn that told me 
'Twas he, not I, that knew.' 

"While the fire was burning I mused" reverses 
the psalmist's statement, "While I was musing 
the fire burned," but fairly describes the common 
experience. "I simmer," said old Palgrave, "as 
the liquor doth on the fire before it beginneth to 
boil." The fireside is a place for musing and 
reverie; "cogitate" is too purposeful, and "rumi- 
nate" has too bovine an odor. Soothed by the 
warm, balmy, and ambrosial air, pensiveness 
strokes us with its velvet hands and we succumb 



THE OPEN FIKE: A REVERIE 25 

to the mesmeric spell. The hymn for the fire- 
side is not "Awake, my soul, stretch every 
nerve," nor "My soul, be on thy guard,'' but, 
rather, "My willing soul would stay in such a 
frame as this.'' The soothing, tranquillizing, 
restorative touch of elemental things is reported 
in what one man finds : "When things have gone 
wrong in business during the day, and my mind 
is full of care and cumber, I can generally forget 
it all by going out to look at the stars, or by lis- 
tening to music, or by watching the open fire." 
A man under the stars or by the fire is in a mood 
to hear Schiller's word: "O cast away the fret 
and worry of this earthly life ; rise on the wings 
of beauty to the realm of the ideal. And when 
you have issued forth from the trammels of time 
and sense into the freedom of the kingdom of 
thought, lo, fear and doubt will pass away." As 
beautiful, benign, cheering, and comforting as 
a summer evening may be the brilliance of a 
winter night, all asparkle outdoors and in. Out- 
side "in the icy air of night, the stars that over- 
sprinkle all the heavens seem to twinkle with 
a crystalline delight"; inside, the sparks that 
fly up like swarms of golden bees mimic the 
twinkling fireflies of the sky and make the night 
indoors as brilliant and elemental as the spangled 
firmament. 

Through the centuries many notable firelit 
faces have been snapshotted and preserved, il- 
lumined, some of them by the glare of conflagra- 



26 THE OPEN FIRE 

tions, some by the glow of hearthfires. Looking 
back, they appear like a torchlight procession 
moving through the dark. In far-back regions, 
where history and legend blend, the flames of 
burning Troy make visible to all after times the 
face of Spartans stolen child. A Baltimorean, 
who has a Helen of his own, tells us that when 
he sits with her before the hearth, looking at her 
face flushed by the firelight's ruddy glow and 
watching her feed the flames with aromatic pine 
cones, his Homer comes back to him and he sees 
the face of that earlier Helen, whose beauty was 
the prize of Priam's son and around which the 
action of the Iliad revolves, lit by the blaze of 
burning Troy. Little Robert Browning, sitting 
at evening on his father's knee before the hearth 
in the library, listened entranced to the ancient 
tale of the siege of Troy, until, to his excited 
imagination, the mounting flames in the fireplace 
were the burning city, and among the glowing 
coals the lad saw many-oared triremes and hel- 
meted figures, with spears and shields, and the 
faces of Menelaus and Paris and Helen. That 
potent face which "launched a thousand ships 
and burnt the topless towers of Ilium," and 
"drew the dreaming keels of poesy across the 
seas of all subsequent ages," is so immortally fa- 
mous that Synge, the Irish dreamer, in the twen- 
tieth Christian century, imagines the holy 
prophets straining the bars of Paradise to lay 
eyes on Helen of Troy. 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 27 

The conflagration of five sevenths of Rome 
(64 B. c.) makes more lurid against the dark 
background of antiquity the hideous and hateful 
face of Nero, who was fiddler, aesthete, lecher, 
matricide, and suicide, achieving endless infamy 
for himself within the same number of years 
as the Man of Nazareth took to live his life 
and die the death which redeemed the world, 
gathering to himself the endless worship of ador- 
ing millenniums. 

Pictures of fire-lit faces by the fireside are 
usually good and pleasant to look upon; the 
home hearth is not a bad man's resort; some 
place like the barroom suits him better ; and al- 
ways it is the pictures of the good that are every- 
where more apt to be preserved. Quite typical is 
a pleasing seventeenth-century picture which 
shows us Robert Herrick, the master among Eng- 
lish poets of pastoral lyrics and tender love 
verses, incumbent of a Devonshire ^'living," "a 
rather timid bachelor gentleman of middle age, 
sitting by the fire in a snug and modest country 
parsonage,'' and writing out of a gentle heart his 
quaintly simple thanksgiving to God for the 
homely dwelling which shelters him in his Dean 
Prior parish: 

"A little house, whose humble roof 
Is weather proof; 
Under the spars of which I lie 
Both soft and dry; 

Where thou, my chamber for to ward, 
Hast set a guard 



28 THE OPEN FIRE 

Oh, harmless thought, to watch and keep 

Me, while I sleep, . . . 

Some brittle sticks of thorn or briar 

Make me a fire. 

Close by whose living coal I sit. 

And glow like it." 



In American history there is an early picture of 
Thomas Jefferson, with the hearth light on his 
face, reading the Gospels before the fire on win- 
ter evenings and getting therefrom the ethical 
ideas which went into the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. A later American picture shows 
young Abraham Lincoln lying face downward 
before the hearth, his long, lank, angular form 
stretched full length on the clay floor of a hum- 
ble cabin, with the firelight on his homely fea- 
tures, studying hard and beginning to get him- 
self ready for the Emancipation Proclamation 
and the immortal Gettysburg address and the 
solemn majesty of his second inaugural and the 
apotheosis at the touch of an assassin's bullet 
at the climax of his illustrious career. 

Young William Winter once saw Longfellow 
sitting by his open fireplace late at night, after 
all his household had retired, watching the 
flames, listening to the wind in the chimney, mus- 
ing and occasionally jotting down with a pencil 
whatever came into his thoughts. 

David Gray carried in his memory a fireside 
picture of Charles Eliot Norton, a teacher of rare 
charm and penetrating quality who taught gen- 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 29 

erations of students the art of making life sweet 
and sound and fine with high ideals and noble 
conduct. This is the picture : "It was toward the 
close of his active life. The lamplight and the 
firelight fell upon the bent figure of a scholar 
in his chair. He held a book. The pleasant room 
was walled with books. The portrait by Vero- 
nese of a Venetian lady with a pearl necklace 
glowed dimly in the subdued light. The old 
man's voice rose and fell in even, modulated 
cadences. He was reading aloud from Brown- 
ing's great poem : 

'Well, here's the platform, here's the proper place; 

Hail to your purlieus, 
All ye highfliers of the feathered race, 

Swallows and curlews. 
Here's the top-peak: the multitude below 

Live, for they can, there: 
This man decided not to Live, but Know — 

Bury this man there? 
Here — here's his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form, 

Lightnings are loosened. 
Stars come and go. Let joy break with the storm, 

Peace let the dew send. 
Lofty designs must close in like effects: 

Loftily lying. 
Leave him — still loftier than the world suspects, 

Living and dying.' 

He finished, his voice clear but resonant with 
emotion. His great spirit shone in his eyes. He 
closed the book, and sat there, venerable and 
lovable, with the light on his face." 

Mrs. Wyatt Eaton tells of Louis Stevenson's 



30 THE OPEN FIRE 

visit to the Sanborn cottage at Point Pleasant on 
the Manasquan in April, 1888, and pictures the 
author of Treasure Island and The Merry Men in 
the midst of a gay, convivial company, seating 
himself before the grate, the flickering light of 
the wood flames illuminating his thin, consump- 
tive face to a vivid transparency. "Once or twice 
for a few moments he relapsed into silence, gaz- 
ing into the fire with the rapt look of one who 
sees visions or dreams dreams." A lady broke 
his dreaming with "You look as though you saw 
salamanders, or are you thinking of the golden al- 
chemy of Lescaris?" "Salamanders,'' he replied, 
smiling. "Yes, man-eating monsters that do 
away with him and his dreams forever." 

What will go on in the mind of man or woman 
sitting before the fire seems wholly problem- 
atical. When Dr. Weelum Maclure sat thawing 
himself out that bitter December night in Drum- 
tochty before Drumsheugh's blazing fire, with the 
gusty wind roaring in the chimney and dying 
away in a long moan across the fields, and the 
snow storm beating against the windows; and 
the two old men, both past seventy, sat in con- 
tented silence, "Drumsheugh gazed long into the 
red caverns on the hearth and saw former 
things." 

Celia Thaxter on the Isles of Shoals, safe and 
cozy indoors, by the blaze of beach-gathered drift- 
wood, hears the storm raging furiously, thinks of 
her tiny winged playmate of the day, the little 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 31 

sandpiper, wonders where he will sleep to-night, 
remembers the sparrow's Caretaker, and cries to 
her flying comrade: 

"I do not fear for thee, though wroth 
The tempest rushes through the sky: 
For are we not God's children both, 
Thou, little sandpiper, and I?" 

Once on a time, as a grizzled old man gazed 
dreamily into a bed of coals, there came to him 
out of the far hinterland of memory the vision of 
a woman rocking before the fire, crooning a hymn 
to her little boy, whose curly head lay lightly in 
"the good place God fashioned for it — the hollow 
'twixt her bosom and her arm"; and the lonely 
old man felt as if the fire were mothering him. 

Robert Browning's mother jealously kept for 
herself, as the dearest privilege of the day, a 
twilight hour of solitude and darkness and 
music; and the great poet all his long life re- 
membered being held in his father's lap before 
the library fire and hearing his mother, sitting 
alone and without a light in the next room, sing- 
ing familiar old hymns. She sang and prayed 
her own deeply religious temper and warm 
evangelical faith into her little boy, and in years 
when she was no more on earth her strong son 
said with grateful emotion, "She was a divine 
woman." 

Eugene Field, alone by the fire, had the silence 
in which he was sitting changed into a vesper 



32 THE OPEN FIRE 

service by the sound of his child's small voice in 
an adjoining room saying sweetly her "Now I 
lay me down to sleep." It sent him back to 
his own childhood, made him a child again 
kneeling at his mother's knee; and with tears in 
his eyes the world-worn man bowed his head on 
his breast and reverently repeated his earliest 
petition, "Now I lay me." The voice of history 
cries to all mothers as in God's name: "Sing 
hymns to your little children and teach them to 
pray." A certain general of the war for the Union 
found his mother's hymns singing in his head 
before the battle. One of his mother's hymns 
sung by a street missionary's little band helped 
to save wild Billy Sunday, reveling in bad com- 
pany on the streets of Chicago. All the account 
Edison in "Who's Who" gives of his education is, 
"Received some instruction from his mother: at 
twelve years of age a newsboy on Grand Trunk 
Railway." 

In Browning's "By the Fireside," Husband 
Robert sits watching his wife, with the fire-glow 
on her features and her curls — the "great brow 
and the spirit-small hand propping it." With the 
immortal faith and love which makes firesides 
holy, he says to his Elizabeth : 

"Think, when our one soul understands 

The great Word which makes aU things new, 
When earth breaks up and heaven expands, 
How will the change strike me and you. 
In the house not made with hands?" 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 33 

Later on, in middle life, looking ahead to life's 
December, Browning sees himself, in anticipa- 
tion, with the firelight on his gray hairs and 
wrinkled face: 

"I shall be found by the fire, I suppose. 
O'er a great book as beseemeth age, 

While the shutters flap as the cross-wind blows, 
And I turn the page and I turn the page; 

Not verse then, only prose." 

In London, on the last day of 1858, William J. 
Fox, aged seventy-three, comfortable in the 
warmth of his library fire, wrote to his 
daughter thus: "What an array of Christ- 
mases and New Years I look back upon ! And in 
what a variety of situations and relations they 
found me ! What a phantasmagoria of figures, if 
I could paint all the holiday dinners and people ! 
All the first batch was cleared off long ago ; the 
second generation have nearly all followed; and 
the third set is now on. I am making up my 
accounts, and I think it is time." 

James Whitcomb Riley, on his fifty-ninth 
birthday, sits in his study by a crackling fire, 
surrounded by gift-flowers and messages from a 
host of friends, meditating on the fast-flying 
years and repeating to himself old Walter Savage 
Landor's lines: 

"I warmed both hands before the fire of Life; 
It sinks, and I am ready to depart." 

To a friend who inquired after his health, 
John Hay replied : "I have an incurable disease." 



34 THE OPEN FIRE 

"What is it?" asked the startled friend. 

"Old age," answered the great diplomat, who 
at sixty-eight musing on the favored and enviable 
lot of those who, not living to be old, are remem- 
bered as forever young, wrote: 

"At even, when the brief wintry day is sped, 

I muse beside my fire's faint flickering glare — 
Conscious of wrinkling face and whitening hair — 

Of those who, dying young, inherited 

The immortal youthfulness of the early dead. 
I think of Raphael's grand-seigneurial air; 
Of Shelley and Keats, with laurels fresh and fair 

Shining un withered on each sacred head; 

And Soldier boys who snatched death's starry prize. 

With sweet life radiant in their fearless eyes. 
The dreams of love upon their beardless lips, 

Bartering dull age for immortality; 

Their memories hold in Death's unyielding fee 
The youth that thrilled them to the finger tips." 

In a Maryland mansion named Altodale, one 
of the noblest of Christian homes, hospitable to 
guests from every land, on a cool May evening, 
the open fire was semicircled by the family group 
plus three guests. After the conversation had 
flitted to and fro firefly fashion, sparkling like 
the burning logs for a while, a United States 
commissioner of education, later chancellor of 
New York University, recited by request to the 
hushed company, that exquisite and sacred frag- 
ment by Nathaniel J. Burton : 

"Heaven is rest and joy, and it requires the 
heart to interpret that, and grasp its immeasur- 
able meaning. O, when I am tired — when my 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 35 

body is unstrung and my soul is jaded; when my 
hopes flag, and my ambitions flicker in their 
socket; when the night does not refresh me and 
the morning does not cheer me ; when the song of 
birds is heavy music, and all the trees of the 
field seem chastened, and the brooks are weary 
and creep and gurgle and lament; when the 
beauty of women is vanity to my eyes, and I can 
see no dignity in the faces of men; when the 
friends of my youth are scattered and dead, and 
my eyes are evermore striving to look beyond to 
the distant horizon as for some country far 
away; when long-gone forms crowd my memory, 
the young, the old, the beautiful, the revered; 
when my sympathies are pensive and introspec- 
tive, and I live with the dead whom I knew more 
than with the living whom I know; when the 
winds complain and sob at my casement all the 
day ; when the love and the hate, and the efforts 
and delights of men seem small and empty — O, 
when I am tried and sad and worn out — I know 
what my God intended when he said, ^Rest and 
joy in Heaven.' Amen." 

A man, alone before the fire, may have to 
reckon with memory and conscience. A poet 
pictures Napoleon sitting gloomily alone before 
the fire, himself ^^dying like an untended watch- 
fire on Saint Helena," and bids us guess whether 
that victim of unmerciful disaster, on his rock 
of exile, haunted by memories, thinks oftenest of 
the wreck of ambition or the loss of a woman's 



36 THE OPEN FIRE 

love — Waterloo or Josephine. Skinflint Scrooge, 
alone, the firelight on his flinty face, with its 
sharp nose, thin lips, and pointed chin, is 
haunted by his past. Old Marley was as dead as 
a doornail, and Scrooge knew he was dead, but 
that did not protect the miser. Suddenly Mar- 
ley^s ghost appeared. The unwelcome visitor 
came on through the heavy door and passed into 
the room before his eyes. 

"How now? What do you want with me?'^ 
demanded Scrooge. 

"Much,'^ said the ghost. Not a pleasant visitor. 

Thomas Hardy's cheerless and haunted mind 
laments 

"That every hearth has a ghost, alack, 
And can be but the scene of a bivouac 
For a painful halt till the time to pack." 

Some very strange reports are abroad as to 
what has been seen in the open fire. When Lewis 
Carroll's Alice, "Child of the pure, unclouded 
brow and dreaming eyes of wonder," got through 
the looking glass into the room behind it, the 
very first thing she did was to look whether 
there was a fireplace, and she was well pleased 
to find a real fire blazing brightly. She was much 
surprised to see queer little figures moving about 
on the hearth. Going down on her hands and 
knees to look close, she saw they were chessmen ; 
the Red King and the Red Queen were walking 
about among the coal and cinders, while the 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 37 

White King and the White Queen were sitting 
on the edge of the shovel, and the White Knight 
was amusing himself by sliding down the poker. 
It was before that strangely populated fire that 
little Alice read the fearsome tale of how 

"The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, 
Came whiflBing through the tulgey wood. 
And burbled as it came"; 

and how "the beamish boy" went out and smote 
it with his "vorpal blade" ; 

"One, two, one, two, and through and through 

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack. 
He left it dead, and with its head 
He went galumphing back." 

Alice did not wonder at the welcome given to the 
slayer of the monster: 

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? 
Come to my arms, my beamish boy. 
O frabjous day, Calloh, Calloy. 
He chortled in his joy." 

Companionable and social is the open fire, as 
Burroughs said: "How it responds when you 
nudge it, and rejoices when you feed it." A man 
stark alone in his city house on a cool evening 
in the early fall, his family still away in the 
country, went down cellar, broke up a packing 
box, and built a fire in the dining-room fireplace 
more for company than for warmth; found it a 
vivacious, sparkling, and entertaining compan- 
ion; found that tending the fire is sufficient oc- 



38 THE OPEN FIRE 

cupation to keep one from feeling that he belongs 
to the army of the unemployed ; found that nurs- 
ing a wood fire is the next thing to having a child 
to mind, enough to keep one busy and the moods 
and tenses of the one about as incalculable as 
those of the other. At bedtime this man went 
upstairs feeling that he had had a sociable and 
animated, as well as innocent and peaceful, even- 
ing. Dickens' Joe Gargery, who w^as "oncom- 
mon fond of reading,'' easily dispensed with 
company. "Give me a good book or a good 
newspaper," he said, "and set me down afore a 
good fire, and I ask no better." 

"My son," says one of the characters in an 
English story, "a romance begins when two ani- 
mated individuals can be silent for five minutes 
without either of them noticing it. It ends when 
both are afraid of silence and feel obliged to fill 
the minutes with conventional speech. Do you 
know enough about the mute communion of con- 
genial souls to understand what I mean?" Be- 
tween friendly souls an open fire may supersede 
the need of conversation. One raw, gray, gloomy 
day Tennyson dropped in on Carlyle; found him 
sitting solitary before the fire; without palaver 
dropped quietly into a chair beside him. There 
the two old men sat for an hour, gazing con- 
tentedly into the fire without speaking a word. 
When an hour had passed sociably, but in utter 
silence, Tennyson rose to go. Carlyle, without 
rising, reached up his hand and said simply and 



THE OPEN FIRE : A REVERIE 39 

sincerely, "Come again, Alfred, we've had a 
grand, good time." Their session was as free 
and amiable as a Quaker meeting or a meeting 
of "the Society of Silent Unity." Imagine how 
intolerably different it might have been if, instead 
of gazing together into the sociable open fire, they 
had sat staring at each other for an hour in 
silence. Such an interview would have seemed 
inane, if not morose; they might have been glar- 
ing at each other before the hour was ended. 
The friendly fire acted as intermediary and main- 
tained the entente cordiale. The famous scene 
when Lord Palmerston and Russell "met, em- 
braced, and hated each other worse than ever," 
did not transpire in the presence of a genial open 
fire. The Court of Arbitration in the Peace 
Palace at The Hague should transact its business 
(if it ever has any) in front of a great, big, 
kindly hearthfire. 

The socializing influence of the open fire has 
been known to have a share in matrimonial re- 
sults. The dictionary instructs us that the 
ardent participial noun, "sparking," is ambigu- 
ous and may relate to a fire or a lover, yet possi- 
bly to both, as when two middle-aged persons 
chanced to meet as guests in the same house and 
the family, retiring at the end of the evening, 
left them purring together by the open fire. 
Hours afterward, when that man and woman 
bade each other good night, they had formed a 
Zwei-Bund; they were pledged to each other for 



40 THE OPEN FIRE 

life. The man, if he had lingered by the sinking 
fire with her "Good night'^ in his ears, might 
have repeated T. A. Daly's verse : 

"Good night, and then your candle's feehle glare 
Went glimmering up the stair; 
A door closed, and the house was still. 
The night grew old 

And from the smoldering hearth the cold 
Stole forth and laid its chill 
On heart and hrain that had been fain 
To make a song of cheer. 
For, O, the summer warm and bright 
You conjured in the winter night 
Went upward with your candlelight. 
Went with you up the stair." 

Friendly communion by the fire is warming to 
the cockles of the heart. Lionel Johnson, in a 
moment of revulsion from institutions and im- 
plements, realizing the potency and preciousness 
of human intercourse, and advocating the value 
of the living personal touch, cries : "O swimming 
baths and cookery classes, Botticellis and banjos, 
congresses and councils, what are you worth com- 
pared to a talk with a friend by the fire?" Sir 
Gilbert Parker keeps himself from loneliness by 
communing in thought with his friends : 

"When blows the wind and drives the sleet, 

And ice-clad trees bend down; 
When all the world is chill'd 'tis meet 

Good company be known; 
And in my heart good company 

Sits by the fire and sings to me. 
The ingle-nook right warm shall be 

Where my heart hath good company." 



THE OPEN FIRE : A REVERIE 41 

To his old friends, Whittier, in his "Snow 
Bound," sent this invitation : 

"Come sit with me by the homestead hearth, 
And stretch the hands of memory forth 
To warm them at the wood-fire's blaze." 

The wilder the weather the cheerier the fireside. 
When the snow is driving over the fields, and 
rough old Winter is blustering at the doors and 
rattling the windows, Emerson pictures the cozy- 
comfort of the farmhouse inmates sitting 
"around the radiant fireplace, inclosed in a 
tumultuous privacy of storm." We all agree with 
Holland's "Kathrina" that 

"The storm makes sweeter music to our huddled hearts 
Than choirs of stars can sing on fairest nights." 

Grim, glorious John Milton's sonnets say that 
sitting by the glowing hearth-fire in dreary win- 
ter weather may "help us waste a sullen day and 
gain what may be won from the hard season." 
The fire on the hearth promotes a sociable and 
homelike feeling by the informal private musi- 
cales it gives with such quaint old-fashioned ac- 
companiments as the kettle, the cricket, the pussy 
cat, and possibly the dog. The logs hum and 
hiss and whistle and warble; the kettle audibly 
boils and bubbles; the cricket chirps; pussy 
purrs; the sleeping house dog snores. Dickens 
opens his Cricket on the Hearth with "The kettle 
began it. ... I say the kettle did. . . . The kettle 



42 THE OPEN FIRE 

began it full five minutes by the little Dutch 
clock in the corner before the cricket uttered a 
chirp.'' 

Saint-Saens, French composer and organ- 
ist, showed, even in his cradle, exquisite sensi- 
tiveness to sounds. In advanced years he said 
that in his nurse's arms his "greatest pleasure 
was the symphony of the kettle on the hob." That 
soft bubbly shrilling of the kettle-spout has en- 
tree to the ear as natural as air has to the lungs. 
It is a strain of elemental music — water, fire and 
air simmering together — akin to the quiet tune 
sung to the sleeping woods all night by Cole- 
ridge's hidden brook ; one w^ith the tune to which 
Emerson heard the atoms marching. So Mother 
Nature was the nurse who held that French baby 
in her arms before the fire and gave him ecstasy 
to drink. 

Now, as to the kettle. Dr. J. H. Jowett appears 
as its laureate in this passage in a sermon on 
"Thankfulness" : "Practice singing among the 
simplicities. Sydney Smith, the great wit, once 
said: *I gave a lady twenty-two recipes against 
melancholy.' I will quote three. (I am afraid 
this applies more to England than to here. ) One 
was, a bright fire, another was to remember all 
the pleasant things said to her, and another, a 
kettle simmering on the hob. You don't know 
what that is, do you? It is one of the pleasantest 
sounds in the peasant's cot. Let me be very inti- 
mate with you for a moment. I remember in 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 43 

my mother's home, away in a little house in the 
West Riding of Yorkshire, in England, I can see 
the kettle when the water is boiled, laid on the 
side-on the hob. I can hear it singing ; and there 
is a contented, containing sound about it which 
it contributes to the whole atmosphere. A sing- 
ing kettle is a very welcome thing about my old 
home. And Sydney Smith said to the melancholy 
w^oman in his recipes, *Have a simmering kettle 
on the hob.' A trifle. A tremendous trifle. A 
simplicity, a commonplace. But the witty dean 
meant that just listening to such things makes 
the simple music of the simple life. Open your 
ears; receive them, and the singing kettle may 
help you to sing. If I may paraphrase my Mas- 
ter, I would say, ^He that is grateful in that 
which is least shall be grateful also in much,' 
and if he will be grateful for the sound of the 
simmering kettle, he will shortly be grateful for 
the song of the angels which bring good news to 
him. Practice it, and you will succeed. 'In 
everything give thanks.' " 

As for that shy, plaintive, reticent, tiny jon- 
gleur of the fireside, the cricket — is he really 
chirping anywhere nowadays outside of Dickens' 
books? When a city man, retired from business, 
talks in rhyme to ''An obscure poet who lives on 
my hearth," we leniently concede the possibility 
of a hearth and an open fire in a city dwelling; 
but we doubt the existence of that cricket out- 
side the rhymester's imagination. No self-respect- 



44 THE OPEN FIRE 

ins: cricket would consent to reside in New York 
city, unless in some very old mansion myste- 
riously spared and soon to be torn down. 

As for the cat, a current short story poses 
kitty very naturally before the fire in this pleas- 
ing picture: "A wood fire was flickering in the 
square, old-fashioned, red fireplace, held up by 
straddling andirons and fenced in by a glitter- 
ing brass fender. Before the fender, in the cen- 
ter of the neatly swept hearth, sat a small gray 
kitten, her tail curled about her, her little ears 
daintily pricked, her little feet demurely to- 
gether, watching with the wide eyes of kitten- 
hood the slowly rising smoke. The room was 
still ; there was no one near ; only the diminutive 
gray kitten composedly surveying the gently 
crackling flames in the deep fireplace — surely an 
exquisite picture of contentment and tran- 
quillity." To properly complete that homelike 
scene, other homely and familiar furnishings — 
the poker and shovel and tongs and turkey- wing 
hearth-sweeper, dearer to memory than bric-a- 
brac and parlor ornaments — should be added to 
andirons and fender. 

A description of the library of Francis Park- 
man says: "Up in that study he used to sit all 
the winter months in the company of his books 
and manuscripts, while the fire from the open 
stove flickered salutations to the shelves oppo- 
site.'^ As to that "open stove," A. H. Joline 
properly remarked that "it grates a little on our 



THE OPEN FIRE: A REVERIE 45 

nerves. No library or sitting room is perfect 
witliout an open fire, stoveless be it understood, a 
fire on the hearth, with a fat, comfortable cat 
who will purr on pressure," or^ we add, an ami- 
able, outstretched dog, offering his well-cushioned 
ribs as a foot-rest for the sitter in front of the 
fire. A stove robs a room of its poetry. 
"Poetry," George Meredith said, "is compounded 
of form and fire." Kipling performed a masterly 
miracle in tuning McAndrew's engines to a 
mighty chant of praise, but not even Kipling 
could make poetry out of stoves, or hot-air regis- 
ters, or steam-radiators, or gas-logs. But an open 
fire is a poem of subtle elemental fascination, 
writ in lambent lines of flame. It is a spectacle, 
an entertainment, a moving-picture show, a 
vision which "decomposes but to recompose," 
a song without words, a piece of woodland music 
improvised by some invisible dryad. "When old 
Robert draws the backbrand in, the green logs 
steam and spit," and we listen to one of Nature's 
lyrics in 

"The crooning of the blithe wood-flame — 
A single bar of music fraught 
With cheerful, yet half pensive thought — 
A thought elusive; out of reach, 
Yet trembling on the verge of speech." 

An odoriferous delight also is the open fire when 
the right sort of wood is burning. 

"The oozing pine logs flame and flare. 
Wafting the perfume of their native woods"; 



46 THE OPEN FIRE 

and in the wood-smell is some opiate vapor which 
gives delicious dreams without somnolence. 
Spruce, which is fragrant with resinous aroma, 
is also the liveliest of woods, often making a min- 
iature Fourth of July on the hearth, with its 
snapping and crackling and popping fireworks. 
Magical, brilliant, and various are the effects 
and exploits of the open fire. It fastens its fas- 
cinations on the new-born baby and the white- 
haired grandsire. One young mother hoped that 
when the earliest intelligent gaze, the first really 
attentive and seeing look, should come into her 
first-born's face, it might fix itself on her own 
face. One evening when she was rocking him in 
her lap before the fire, a burning log broke and 
fell with a great burst of sparks, startling the 
baby. Then for the first time the soul peeped 
out in what seemed a perceiving look of wonder 
and delight. The eager mother, who had waited 
for the coming of that look of awareness, put 
her jealous face nearer his to appropriate that 
look to herself, but the little face turned from 
her kiss ; the fascinated infant eyes were held by 
the burst of sparks at which he gazed and smiled. 
Happily unaware he was that "man is born to 
trouble as the sparks fly upward." The open fire 
which fixed the baby's gaze talked articulately 
as with lambent tongues of flame to the young 
mother's gray-haired father, whose easy-chair 
was next to her low rocker. Watching the fiery 
fountain that spirted upward from the fallen 



THE OPEN FIRE : A REVERIE 47 

log, he meditated on Job's saying that, as surely 
as "the sparks, the children of the burning coals, 
lift up to fly," so surely is man's lot a troubled 
one. Seeing on the wall behind them the waver- 
ing shadows of three generations, the old man's 
experienced and sober mind recalled the say- 
ing of Edmund Burke, "What shadows we 
are and what shadows we pursue I'^ — an exclama- 
tion uttered w^hen the great Irish statesman and 
orator, mourning the loss of his son, felt that he 
would not, in that desolate hour, "give a peck of 
spoiled wheat for all the empty honors of the 
w^orld." That passage in Job about the upflying 
sparks had its meaning altered and improved by 
a Bible- wise English cobbler, whose fine spiritual 
insight, by simply changing the place of the pe- 
riod, made it read: "Man is born to trouble. 
(Therefore) as the sparks fly upward I would 
seek unto God and unto God would I commit my 
cause." If only all higher critics were as intelli- 
gent and useful as that pious country shoe- 
maker! John Oxenham's verses on the "Sacra- 
ment of Fire" are not out of place here : 

"Kneel always when you light a fire! 
Kneel reverently, and thankful be 
For God's unfailing charity, 
And on the ascending flame inspire 
A little prayer, that shall upbear 
The incense of your thankfulness 
For this sweet grace 
Of warmth and light! 
For here again is sacrifice 
For your delight. 



48 THE OPEN FIRE 

"Within the wood, 
That lived a Joyous life 
Through sunny days and rainy days 
And winter storms and strife; 
Within the coal, 
Where forests lie entombed, — 
Oak, elm, and chestnut, beech, and red 

pine bole; 
God shrined his sunshine, and enwombed 
For you these stores of light and heat. 
Your life-joys to complete. 
These all have died that you might live; 
Yours now the high prerogative 
To loose their long captivities, 
And through these new activities 
A wider life to give. 

"Kneel always when you light a fire! 
Kneel reverently, 
And grateful be 
For God's unfailing charity!" 

"Around our habitation be Thou a wall of 
light" is the inscription on the terra-cotta chim- 
ney piece above the fireplace in the central hall 
of the Pine Tree Inn at Lakehurst, where, in fact, 
this idyll of the open fire started. Those words 
from an old hymn are possibly an echo of the 
divine promise of protection given the Holy City 
in Zechariah^s time : "I will be unto her a wall of 
fire round about." . . . On the fagade of the 
twenty-seventh psalm, that temple of peace, are 
chiseled and gilded these words of quietness and 
assurance: "The Lord is my light and my sal- 
vation." 

The Lady of Hollyhock House at Oneida, 



THE OPEN FIRE : A REVERIE 49 

N. Y., thinks a good fireplace inscription to focus 
the attention of the house upon would be the re- 
vised text of a verse in the thirty-seventh psalm : 
"Fret not — ^it tendeth only to evil-doing." 

On the frozen body of a missionary to the far 
north a bit of paper was found on which his 
numbed fingers had written, in triumph of spirit 
over flesh, "It is not cold where Christ is.'' One 
Christian missionary home inscribed in letters 
of gold above the radiant light and warmth of 
its open fire that agraphon of Jesus preserved by 
Origen : "He who is near Me is near the fire." 



VISIBLE VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 

This is not a literary criticism from a college 
chair of English literature, but an estimate of 
values from the standpoint of practical life; no 
academic discussion, but a report of one man's 
experience with Browning while harnessed to the 
load of daily labor, in touch with human nature 
and human needs, as known and felt in actual 
life. No fair survey of English literature in the 
Victorian age can fail to recognize Robert 
Browning as one of the most potent intellectual 
and religious forces of his time ; and no liberally 
educated person can afford to be unacquainted 
with the products 'of his genius. We submit a 
few reasons which make it profitable to cultivate 
acquaintance with this poet. 

I. If anybody wants initial mental impulse to 
set his mind going, Browning furnishes it. 
Thackeray said that he wrote when he sat down 
to write; that as soon as he got his nose to the 
desk his ideas came. When G. H. Lewes was 
telling Huxley that he never had any difficulty 
in getting into the full swing of composition, 
saying; "I never hesitate. I get up steam at 
once. In short, I boil at a low temperature"; 
Huxley, whose experience was different, said, 
^'But that implies a vacuum in the upper re- 

50 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 51 

gions." Dr. Charles H. Parkhurst says his mind 
rarely starts until he has a pen between his fin- 
gers and a drop of ink on the point of it. Most 
of us will agree that he is fortunate beyond the 
ordinary whose mind always makes a prompt 
start then. Most writers sometimes find it neces- 
sary to set the mental machinery in motion by 
a borrowed impulse. The mind occasionally 
needs arousing: "How do you wake up your 
mind and start it on its best creative action," 
is a question often asked among intellectual 
workers, and answered variously. One replies, 
"I take up Shakespeare" ; another, "I run 
through a few tough propositions in geometry" ; 
another, "I read a chapter in Job or Romans"; 
another, "I touch up my brains and sensibilities 
with Robertson or Bushnell, or Phillips Brooks." 
Beecher said, "When my thoughts hesitate, I pick 
up a suggestive book and read until my mind 
takes fire and gives out sparks of its own." Pro- 
fessor Austin Phelps knew one young preacher 
who found La Place's Mecanique Celeste to be 
most effective in awakening his mind to original 
production. A critic, discussing Emerson^s talks 
with a college boy about the art of writing, says : 
"The outcome of Emerson's precepts is this — to 
see clearly and state lucidly, which is what not 
one writer in five hundred can do. And not one 
in five million can add to clearness of thought 
and lucidity of expression that electric force 
which stirs the reader himself to creative effort. 



52 THE OPEN FIRE 

Emerson has it, and a greater than he — Shake- 
speare." To these we unhesitatingly add a third, 
Robert Browning, whose nearest kin in quality 
among American minds is Emerson, and whose 
only brother among British poets is Shakespeare. 
And we say that for contagious kindling, for in- 
tellectual arousement, for imparting initial im- 
pulse, there is nothing better than Browning's 
best. If the mental machinery will not start up 
when the morning whistle blows for opening the 
mill, just belt the running gear over onto his 
shafting, and get propelling power for a start 
until your own slow furnace fires give you a suf- 
ficient head of steam to make your engines do 
their work. 

II. If anybody cares for intellectual athletics, 
this poet provides a large amount of strenuous 
mental exercise. The Browning literature is a 
gymnasium for the mind. Now, poetry as a means 
of thorough mental discipline will doubtless be a 
novel thought to those whose habit has been to 
regard it only as a relaxation ; but whoever makes 
only such luxurious use of poetry must let the 
Browning shelf alone. He himself said, "I never 
pretended to offer such literature as should be a 
substitute for a cigar or a game of dominoes to 
an idle man." The works of Browning are not 
easy reading suitable for leisure's recreation. No- 
where in prose or poetry is your whole complex 
nature more put upon its mettle, piqued and chal- 
lenged, summoned to responsive action, dared to 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 53 

do its mightiest and keenest on problems, puzzles, 
subtleties, profundities — the mysteries of nature, 
life, and destiny. In no poet, unless it be Shake- 
speare, is mental tension so sustained and ex- 
acted. And if anyone wants a powerful and 
stinging stimulus, a tingling exhilaration to 
tighten every faculty up to its strenuous best, he 
may find it almost anywhere between "Pauline," 
published in 1833, and "Asolando,'' 1889. 

The popular complaint lodged against Brown- 
ing by people who decline to study him, is that he 
is inexcusably difficult because unnecessarily ob- 
scure. Charles Dickens said of Browning's early 
work, "I have read the thing forward and can 
make no sense of it ; I have tried it backward and 
that is no better." When Wordsworth was told 
that Elizabeth Barrett had married Robert 
Browning he said of these rivals of his, "It's a 
good thing the two understand each other, for no 
one else understands them." Carlyle, while de- 
claring Browning's excerpt from the Alkestis of 
Euripides to be the best translation of its kind 
he had ever seen, exclaimed to William Ailing- 
ham concerning Browning's "Agamemnon" : "O 
bless me I Can you understand it at all? I went 
carefully over some parts of it, and for my soul's 
salvation could not make out the meaning." A 
Boston University professor once overheard two 
Browningites : 

"Have you read Browning's last book?" 

"No, have you?" 



54 THE OPEN FIRE 

"Yes, I've been reading it all the morning." 

"Well, how do you like it?" 

"O, it's one of those things, you know, that you 
can't understand; but then, of course, it's glori- 
ous." 

Chesterton, referring to Browning's superb op- 
timism, says that when he praises God he wants 
all men and beasts and fishes and flying crea- 
tures to take part in the applauding chorus of the 
cosmos; but that sometimes he praises in such a 
way that God alone could possibly understand 
the praise. Certain it is that some readers who 
broke into Browning at the wrong place, begin- 
ning, say, with "Sordello," instead of with 
"Herve Kiel" or "The Flight of the Duchess," 
or "Evelyn Hope," or "Pippa Passes," under- 
stood what they read no more than the geese un- 
derstood Schopenhauer : 

"See them un-der-neath the tree 
Gath-er round the goose-girl's knee, 
While she reads them by the hour 
From the works of Scho-pen-hau-er. 

"How pa-tient-ly the geese at-tend! 
But do they re-al-ly comprehend 
"What Scho-pen-hau-er's driv-ing at? 
Oh, not at all; but what of that? 
Nei-ther do I; nei-ther does she; 
And, for that mat-ter, nei-ther does he." 

Lowell said he'd give his copy of "Sordello" to 
anyone who'd lay his hand on his heart and de- 
clare that he understood the poem ; though W. H. 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 55 

Channing asserted that ^^Sordello" only needed 
full and proper punctuation to be perfectly plain. 

All manner of ridicule has been directed at the 
Browning societies, the prime principle of which, 
according to Arlo Bates, is that a poem of Brown- 
ing's is a sort of prize rebus or conundrum to be 
guessed, and the club is a syndicate of brains or- 
ganized for the purpose of mining the deeply 
buried ore of thought and smelting out the mean- 
ing. 

When the Inter-State Commerce Bill was en- 
acted by Congress a sarcastic wag suggested that 
the puzzled railroad companies send it to Brown- 
ing and have him put it into poetry in order to 
make it more lucid. This intimation that the bill 
was more obscure than Browning's poetry was 
evidently considered the utmost possible severity 
of sarcasm. 

The fun that has been poked at Browning and 
his admirers would fill a volume. Many think of 
them about as a musician wrote of Wagner and 
his admirers : "Wagner is the king of musical 
cranks, and most of his disciples commit suicide 
or go to the lunatic asylum in their attempts to 
solve the infinite." A New York daily perpe- 
trated the following squib : "We understand that 
the Grand Jury of Suffolk County, Massachu- 
setts, has found a true bill against the desperado 
who snickered at a Browning reading the other 
day. We conceal this person's name out of re- 
spect to his relatives. At the same time we would 



56 THE OPEN FIRE 

appeal to the excited Bostonians not to smirch 
the glory of the Cyamophagus Capitol by lynch- 
ing this misguided offender. Let him die by the 
law and not by an act of violence almost equal to 
his own." Browning often relished such jokes 
on himself. He once received an envelope from 
America addressed simply to Robert Browning, 
Poet, England. This was what it contained : 

"O Robert B., 
Cannot you see 
You are at times 
Too mixed for me? 
Drop it! if I may make so free.'* 

Browning laughed over it heartily, and a year af- 
terward was heard repeating it with great de- 
light. 

It strikes William Law Symonds as surprising 
that "two of the simplest of modern writers, 
Emerson and Browning, should be so frequently 
deemed obscure." But others besides them have 
been accused of being obscure. The great Amer- 
ican mathematician. Dr. Bowditch, translator of 
La Place's Mecanique Celeste^ confessed that 
whenever he came to a place where La Place 
said, "Whence it plainly appears," he knew that 
he was in for an hour or two of hard toil in try- 
ing to discover how it plainly appeared. Is there 
any among the greatest thinkers who has escaped 
being taxed with obscurity? Archbishop Trench 
says : "Shakespeare's sonnets are so heavily loaded 
with meaning, so doubled-shotted with thought, 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 57 

that, packed as all this is into narrow limits, 
it sometimes imparts no little obscurity to them/' 
And Sidney Lanier, in his poem, "The Crystal," 
chides and forgives Shakespeare for "Fatigues 
most drear, and needless overtax of speech ob- 
scure that had as lief be plain'' ; at the same time 
that he also pardons old Father Homer for his 
"drear harangues that tease the patience of the 
centuries." Professor Boyesen, though he put 
Browning as a poet below Keats and Shelley and 
Tennyson, as all do who value form above sub- 
stance, yet said that his obscurity is not from con- 
fusion of thought but from overfullness. It is 
opulence, not obfuscation. Browning once told 
his critics that if they had to put in one small 
line — cut short, perhaps by metrical necessities — 
some thought big and bouncing, they would com- 
prehend one reason of his obscurity; which re- 
calls a confession of Horace, ^^Brevis esse laboro, 
obscurus fio^' ("In laboring to be concise I be- 
come obscure"). 

Now there is no doubt that Browning meant 
to be intelligible. An artist tells us that in his 
London studio, the poet said one day, "Anybody 
who honestly tries can understand my poetry." 
Once when a friend asked him what was the 
precise idea in a certain passage of his poetry 
the poet read it over and replied, "Really I can- 
not now tell, but I believe it will be worth your 
while to keep on studying it." That was the 
sober saying of a greatly modest man who meant 



58 THE OPEN FIRE 

to write no line that was not full of thought. 
When Dr. Murray was at work on the Philolog- 
ical Society's new dictionary he wrote Brown- 
ing as to the exact meaning he had intended to 
give to certain words in a passage of his writ- 
ings. The poet answered: "Don't know what I 
meant; ask the Browning Society." But Coler- 
idge said of one of his own passages : "These are 
very fine lines, though I say it that should not, 
but hang me if I know the meaning of them, 
though my own composition." When Lord Fran- 
cis Egerton wrote to Goethe for an explanation of 
a passage in "Faust" which puzzled him, the poet 
replied : "I am at a loss as to the meaning. Surely 
you at twenty-four should know better than I at 
seventy-four the meaning of a passage I wrote 
when I was your age." 

Many years of experience with Browning has 
brought at least one student to trust him abso- 
lutely as a sure-footed thinker who always keeps 
his way, even in dark depths or on dizzy heights, 
always means something and knows what he 
means, never is without a terminus a quo and a 
terminus ad quern. The reader's task is to fol- 
low him, which it must be admitted is no more 
like a holiday excursion than climbing the Mat- 
terhorn or the Jungfrau or following Stanley 
through Africa: but it pays. The reason why 
Browning clubs persist, survive, and multiply, 
is that their labor is not unrewarded. Edmund 
Gosse, contrasting our two greatest modern 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 59 

poets, says : "Tennyson lies in Ms floral pomp and 
bloom, like a billowy Vale of Tempe. The young- 
est reader, who reads at all, may descend into 
his flowery dells and find some gates unbarred 
and open fields of daisies. But Browning stands 
like a long, rocky island with beetling crags on 
every side ; we must choose a calm day, and creep 
around him in a boat, searching for an accessible 
cove or sandy islet, from whence to climb into 
his altitudes." But the climb pays. 

Not a little of Browning's alleged obscurity is 
due to the nature of the subjects handled, for he 
is a poet of spiritual things, which are suscep- 
tible only of intimation and adumbration, not of 
exact scientific statement. The contents of man's 
soul cannot be inventoried with precision and 
completeness. The supernatural does not wholly 
submit itself to terms. The infinite can be sug- 
gested, recognized, and responded to, but not for- 
mulated. All sublimest and profoundest reali- 
ties are indescribable ; the measuring-line of lan- 
guage cannot be carried over or under or around 
them. When the spirit-world communicates di- 
rectly with us, is it in words and sentences? The 
admonitions of conscience are inarticulate, yet 
none the less forceful, intelligible, and convinc- 
ing. Of them our poet himself says, "God's inti- 
mations rather fail in clearness than in energy." 
Is it claimed that the witness of the Spirit speaks 
English or uses words, or only that it produces 
persuasion? Charles Lamb's "Dream Children," 



60 THE OPEN FIRE 

faintly seen and vanishing in his reverie, "with- 
out speech strangely impressed upon him the ef- 
fects of speech." We know of nothing that in- 
spires awe, reverence or any of the nobler emo- 
tions, but transcends description and cannot be 
clearly diagramed. In such things an attempt at 
exact description often belittles and degrades. 
Milton's wisdom appears in his shadowy picture 
of Lucifer: "What seemed his head the likeness 
of a kingly crown had on.'' How different this 
from the style of the society Jenkins describing 
for the local newspaper how the bride was 
dressed. Even in physical nature that which af- 
fects us most is not definitely explicable. At 
Table Rock, Niagara, we cannot name the ele- 
ments which subdue us; our joints are unloosed, 
our reins tremble, and we are dazed in all our 
senses by the thunder of an unsyllabled voice, the 
yawning of an unmeasured abyss, the sweep and 
swirl of waters concealed by foam, the vast gulf 
obscure with explosive bursts of mist, the fury 
of vague and awful forces. We are crowded to 
our knees with blanched faces by the indefin- 
able. Experience shows us to be so constituted 
that, if only there be an indubitable reality, 
vagueness of revelation may be more suggestive 
of greatness than distinctness is. 

Even a visible and measurable fact often gains 
in impressiveness when given by a flash of instan- 
taneous suggestion rather than by slow detailed 
description. 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 61 

It is more impressive to see in the premature 
twilight of summer woods, when the sun is at its 
western submergence, some great nightbird tum- 
ble heavily from somewhere in the tree-tops and 
slide softly down a sagging curve under gnarled 
oak limbs, sudden, swift, silent, large, and vague 
through the dim forest-dusk, and up again with 
clumsy ease to some new perch invisible beyond, 
among thick, leafy branches in dark shadows 
of the deepening evening, than to look on that 
same owl, shut in a wooden cage on the end of a 
counter in the country store, blinking at daylight 
glare, discussed by loungers and plagued by 
teasing boys, although and because in the first 
case you cannot describe nor even clearly per- 
ceive the creature, while in the other case you 
can minutely inspect beak, talons, wings, and 
tail, eyes, eyelids, and curious ears. 

But our present point is that Browning's so- 
called obscurity, whatever its cause, is an effec- 
tive mental discipline to his readers, who have 
rare exercise in rapid action, in analysis, and in 
following subtle threads of thought. His omis- 
sions compel the mind to a quick supplying of 
much that is understood but not uttered. He 
requires a degree of attention and alertness 
which shall be equal to catching instantly the 
smallest hint, interpreting a mental glance, un- 
derstanding the meaning of every intonation and 
inflection ; sometimes it is like reading the flash- 
signals of a heliograph in a military campaign. 



62 THE OPEN FIRE 

or the dots and dashes of telegraphy; one needs 
an impressibility so sensitive as to take clearly an 
instantaneous photograph of a flying thought 
which the author does not present nor capture in 
his language-net, but only points at with an 
abrupt exclamation which says, "Look, there it 
goes I'' If the reader did not catch sight of it as 
it flashed past, he has missed connections, and 
the author is immediately unintelligible to him 
and is accused of writing incoherent, senseless 
jargon. Many times the reader is relied upon to 
supply the interspatial and perceive the under- 
lying ; his mind must fly at such a height and be 
so eagle-eyed as to see below the surface the 
outline of what underlies, like submarine valleys 
sloping between the jutting coral islands that 
dot a tropic sea and mark the direction of the 
long reef's sharp spine. Often the reader is ex- 
pected to complete what the poet merely suggests, 
as he himself says in "Sordello" : "What I leave 
bare yourselves can now invest." 

All this is a drill in mental promptitude, sup- 
pleness, acuteness, and agility, which may be 
variously useful. For example, the rapid and in- 
telligent comprehension of many parts of Scrip- 
ture requires the mind to supply what lies im- 
plied but unformulated between the lines. The 
Bible is not an easy volume with all its mean- 
ing lying on the surface. It is not a pavement, 
but a quarry. It is a merchant-ship with more 
of its freight under hatches than on deck; the 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 63 

mere surface-reader cannot understand it. The 
thorough Bible student must go below; must 
dive and blast and fetch up. If the reader can- 
not see what is in the depths and gather up the 
necessary underlying relations between state- 
ments and sentences as he goes, he wall not grasp 
the copious and profound truth; and the Great- 
est of books will seem obscure and unintelligible. 
So too our poet's propensity for circuitous di- 
gressions and long and frequent parentheses 
which so offends and irritates the indolent reader 
or mere word-musician, affords to the studious 
a mental practice in clue-keeping through laby- 
rinthine involutions, in returning safe from all 
excursions, and in holding steadily to the sub- 
ject's fixed center while thought swings round 
its orbit by cycles and epicycles. And this is 
drill for Scripture-study. What about Paul's 
Epistles? Are there any prolix and involved 
sentences there, with parentheses and multi- 
plicity of clauses — there and elsewhere? Equally 
in the study of another volume, that testament 
which is ever both old and new, entitled Human 
Nature and Life, as much truth lies in rela- 
tionships as in facts; given facts, one must look 
between and underneath, or nothing is coherent 
and intelligible. In searching human motives 
and in interpreting action there is urgent need 
for the power to discern subways and keep buried 
connections, for the spiderlike faculty to swing 
across chasms and carry the thread. A long 



64 THE OPEN FIRE 

jump is sometimes required of the mind. This 
saltatory effort Browning trains for. 

III. We cannot help noting also that there is 
training for public speakers or writers in the 
psychologic monologue so much used by Brown- 
ing; which is not a soliloquy but a colloquy car- 
ried on with an implied listener and questioner. 
The preacher's thinking for the pulpit is of this 
same sort. He discourses to and reasons with an 
imagined mind, and must formulate to himself 
as he goes its probable or possible comments and 
questions. He must make his utterances fit the 
attitude and meet the action of the silent auditor 
and interlocutor, with whose unvoiced thoughts 
he really holds a dialogue. The habit of antici- 
pating the listener's responses and fencing with 
them, which is so constant in Browning, is cal- 
culated to give to sermonizing a sprightly alert- 
ness w^hich must preclude dullness, and to impart 
to preaching the aptness and vivid interest of ani- 
mated conversation ; so relieving the audience of 
w^hat our poet himself calls ^'The pig-of-lead-like 
pressure of the preaching-man's immense stu- 
pidity.'^ 

IV. If anybody cares to learn the art of put- 
ting enormous force into a few w^ords — the 
knack of making language dense with meaning — 
Robert Browning has no superior in the art of 
terse, trenchant, telling speech. "Ah, the sense, 
the w^eighty sense," is often the reader's admiring 
exclamation. Sometimes a sentence of his is a 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 65 

bale of goods packed by a hydraulic press, or a 
trip-hammer, ponderous, quick, and crushing, or 
a sharp lancet, or a needle-gun, firing its com- 
pact meaning straight to the mark, or a hand- 
grenade, small, but explosive. The minister ad- 
dressing drowsy audiences of work-wearied men 
and habitual churchgoers blase with much 
preaching, need the power of percussive and 
concussive speech. If preaching be made too vel- 
vety, saccharine, and mellifluous, there is danger 
lest some literary auditor familiar with Gray's 
Elegy shall find a paraphrase floating dreamily 
through his mind as the subtle poison of soft 
cushions takes effect and his heavy eyelids droop ; 

Now fades yon pulpit like a glimmering landscape on my 
sight, 
And all the air a solemn stillness holds, 
Save that the beetle-headed preacher wheels his droning 
flight, 
And the sermon's drowsy tinklings lull the sleepy fold. 

At such moments there is need of something 
like "the cock's shrill clarion or the echoing horn'' 
to rouse those "rude forefathers in their narrow" 
pews ; and it were well if the preacher knew how 
in an emergency to reach for the trump that is 
to wake the dead. And we say that for rifle- 
crack, trumpet-blast sentences, for what some one 
calls "the saber-cuts of speech," for mighty 
rugged dynamitic language, Robert Browning is 
often a masterly instructor, teaching by example. 

V. Another of Browning's values lies in the 



66 THE OPEN FIRE 

subjects he selects, examines, and expounds and 
the way in which he treats them. No poet so con- 
stantly fills his foreground with spiritual reali- 
ties and verities. So true is this that some have 
characterized him as more a preacher than a poet. 
Birrell says, "Browning has more theology than 
most bishops.'' He is a prophet of the highest 
w^orld; not only a master-singer but a spiritual 
seer. The Atlantic Monthly justly calls him an 
acknowledged master in spiritual matters. Dr. 
Johnson was wrong in his assertion in the Life 
of Waller that spiritual themes are not fit sub- 
jects for poetry ; and Professor Corson was right 
in saying that spirituality, whether of theme or 
treatment, constitutes the real life of poetry. 

Browning makes his readers familiar w^ith the 
action of moral forces, shows the transcendent 
significance and effect of casual affairs, and back- 
grounds all earthly things with the infinite be- 
yond. He is the great asserter of the soul, afflrm- 
ing the trustworthiness of its intuitions, the au- 
thority of the inw^ard monitor, the sanctity of 
the light w^hich lighteth every man that cometh 
into the w^orld, the reasonableness of reverence 
and trust, the certainty that Love and Power are 
coequal in the Godhead, the divinely prophetic 
character of our highest cravings. 

It is probably true, as one asserts, that he has 
never been the poet of the fashionable classes, 
being too remote from their indolent, butterfly 
world. A nearer neighbor to them is Oscar Wilde, 



VALUES IN EGBERT BROWNING 67 

or the curled Adonis one sees in the Countess 
Guiccioli's portrait of her paramour. Browning 
is no boudoir singer, no matinee melodist, no 
"Point Lace and Diamonds" versifier. His ad- 
mirers have come, rather, from the sober think- 
ing masses, and, as has been said, "There is a 
class of readers neither literary nor smart who 
found in him something they wanted, and, who 
for the sake of the kernel, were willing to prick 
their fingers with the husk or bruise their joints 
over the shell. They are people to whom the 
problems of life are everything, and what drew 
them to him was his penetration and power in 
handling those problems." They acknowledge 
with gratitude as deep as the human heart, that 
through this man God has blessed them indeed 
and enlarged their coasts. 

Whether Browning's poetry lies close to fact, 
swims in reality, is woven of substance, and helps 
flesh-and-blood humanity in its grapple with 
actual life, judge from these words spoken to a 
friend by Father Huntington when he was toil- 
ing in New York city, in the slums of the East 
Side, to "make low natures better" by his pains : 
"I get little time for reading ; but with my Bible 
and my Browning I can keep mind and soul 
alive." He counts Browning a working factor 
for the spiritual redemption of the world, for 
the regeneration of souls, and the edification of 
character. 

Robert Browning is no worshiper of institu- 



68 THE OPEN FIRE 

tions, dignities, trappings, pomps, or preroga- 
tives, but is possessed with the idea of The 
Supreme Worth of the Human Individual. He 
believed with Bulwer-Lytton that "the soul 
of one man is of more account than the vicissi- 
tudes of this whole physical globe." 

His portrayal of external nature is with a mas- 
ter's eye, and a marvelously firm, swift, accurate 
stroke ; he even confesses to many a thrill of kin- 
ship with the powers called nature ; but his love 
and devotion are not for nature — they are for 
mankind. He does not "send his soul along with 
the cloud's thunder or the dove's brood-song," 
but with the intense throbbing life of struggling, 
tempted, and aspiring men. In the dedication 
of "Sordello" he wrote : "My stress lay on the in- 
cidents in the development of a soul ; little else is 
worth study ; I at least always thought so." His 
stress is not on circumstances, situations, exter- 
nalities but on the inward world. In the swift 
rush of happenings, through all the thick of do- 
ing and suffering, interest centers in the living 
man. What is it that "Paracelsus," "Luria," and 
"Sordello" are working out? In each case, "The 
Tragedy of a Soul." Whatever the shifting of 
scenes, changing of costumes, entrance and exit 
of persons, this is the drama that is always on, 
with powerful presentation, vivid realism, and 
human interest at the maximum, — the soul's 
proof and prowess and progress. An unsur- 
passed demonstrator in spiritual anatomy is 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 69 

Browning, a moral vivisectionist, a keen dissec- 
tor of character and analyzer of motives. See, for 
example, "Sludge, the Medium,'' "Bishop Blou- 
gram's Apology,'' "Prince Hohenstiel Schwan- 
gau. Savior of Society," "Ned Bratts," "Ivan 
Ivanovitch," or "Little Pippa" and contrasted 
personages in the poem which Edmund C. Sted- 
man and Edmund Gosse consider his most origi- 
nal and perfect masterpiece; and especially the 
characters in that magnum opus, "The Ring and 
the Book," a poem two thousand lines longer than 
Homer's "Iliad"; in which Caponsacchi, the 
priest, is called by some his most remarkable 
character-study, as Pompilia is, by many, reck- 
oned the loveliest woman to be found anywhere 
in poetry, if not in all literature. 

Art no more commands Browning's supreme 
interest than does nature. Art he knows, and 
must himself be classed among great artists ; yet 
is he a teacher not in the school of art but in the 
university of life in which art is but an episode. 
Esthetics do not rule him. Man is more than 
marbles, melodies, jewels, canvases, flowers, land- 
scapes, graces, forms. He was always defiantly 
indifferent to the censure visited upon him for his 
disregard of form. And, really, the occasional 
abrupt rugged harshness of his verse is a vice 
which, in him, leans to virtue's side. Partly it 
is the leaping vigor of the thought which makes 
this ruggedness. A gentle sluggish stream will 
flow in smooth straightness or in graceful curves ; 



70 THE OPEN FIRE 

a torrent will cut out a rough channel, often 
angular and ragged with protruding rocks. But 
more largely it is because Browning is so sturdily 
in earnest that whenever the question arises 
whether the idea shall dominate the form or the 
needs of smooth versification shall be allowed to 
modify the idea, he always looks after the inter- 
ests of the idea first. In this he is like Dante, 
who said: "Never a rime led me to say other 
than I meant." This the thinker and the moral- 
ist will approve while the musician and the mod- 
ist find fault. Herder was right in declaring that 
decadence is nigh whenever poetry and literature 
become merely or mainly affairs of form. 

Carlyle, whose prose was as jagged as forked 
lightning, thought poetry should be a song. 
Those who complain that Browning is unmelo- 
dious and afflicts them with eccentricities, broken 
harmonies, and sharp discords, should be asked 
whether finer song is anywhere to be found than 
in his sweetest verses. In his volume, "Fifine at 
the Fair,'' take the Prologue, that wonderful so- 
liloquy of the swimmer with naught between him 
and the sky save a butterfly with whom he com- 
rades, as Celia Thaxter did with the little sand- 
piper on the beach. Take that dainty and de- 
licious morsel entitled "My Star," or the exquis- 
ite bit beginning "Never the time and the place 
and the loved one all together," or "Such a 
starved bank of moss," which preludes "The Two 
Poets of Croisic." If it is believed that any poet 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 71 

of the century could touch the harp more deftly 
than his strong fingers when he pleased to perfect 
music as was ever sounded from Apollo's lute, 
then read from "Paracelsus," 

"Over the sea our galleys went 

With cleaving prows in order brave, 
To a speeding wind and a bounding wave, 
A gallant armament." 

The very surge and swing of the waves is in those 
lines. Read the "Cavalier Tunes," perfect in ring 
and rhythm, with the regular clatter of hoofs and 
jingle of scabbard and spur. For lightsome 
rhythmical movement, metrical sweep and swing, 
magnificent rolling verse, he is as remarkable as 
for powerful conciseness, bright and rapid narra- 
tive, and flashing suggestiveness. When his verse 
runs rugged it is not that the author of "Abt 
Vogler" hath no music in his soul, no ear for 
concord of sweet sounds, but that he cares more 
for higher things. Always the ethical and spirit- 
ual are more to him than the physical, the sensa- 
tional and the artistic. 

VI. Browning's robust masculinity is for 
many one of his notable values. This quality is 
the more prized from being so often lacking 
among poets, and, for that matter, in other places 
where it is highly desirable. The Rev. Sydney 
Smith said, "There are three sexes, men, women, 
and clergymen," and in one line of the "Ring 
and the Book" crafty old Violante says to Pom- 



72 THE OPEN FIRE 

pilia : "A priest is more a woman than a man" ; 
which may have been true, for aught we know, of 
sexless monks and the f rocked clergy of the Papal 
Church; but Protestantism has no use for the 
androgynous feminine male; it wants the bone, 
and brawn, and sinew of manliness. Protestant- 
ism began in burly enough fashion with Luther, 
and it needs men so manly in quality and bear- 
ing, so muscular in thought and speech, so stal- 
wart and hirsute in sentiment and action, as 
that their manhood shall be obvious and demon- 
strative. 

In Browning one encounters the indubitable 
masculinity of a mind as virile as it is virtuous. 
The effeminate find nothing congenial in him. 
The ladylike aesthete quickly tires of an attempt 
to wrestle with the rugged thoughts. This 
thinker has the right arm of a blacksmith and 
the grip of a giant. In all his utterances we know 
with our eyes shut it is a bearded mouth that 
speaks and a man's voice that we hear. In Ten- 
nyson's earlier years Lord Lytton named him 
"Miss Alfred.'' No one ever dreamed of such an 
epithet for Browning. 

He has tenderness most delicate and exquisite, 
but it is the tenderness of Sir Philip Sidney, or of 
Cromw^ell, or Wellington, or Abraham Lincoln. 
It is tenderness that never drivels or whimpers, 
tenderness that melts behind firm barriers, looks 
out from the embrasures of strength, and is seen 
like a child's face at the porthole of a man-of- 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 73 

war. James Russell Lowell said that Browning's 
chief characteristic is strength ; and we believe 
that a fair verdict will call him the most power- 
ful thinker that has used the forms of poetry 
since Holy Trinity Church, in Stratford village 
on Avon's bank, received the bones which pos- 
terity is so sternly forbidden to disturb. That 
Browning has the magnific gift of power is un- 
deniable by his bitterest critics, and as Olive's 
friend in the poem says, "Power is power, my 
boy, and still marks a man." For his rugged dar- 
ing and Titanic force, Augustine Birrell calls 
Browning "the Danton of modern poetry." Lan- 
dor long ago wrote of him : 

"Since Chaucer was alive and hale, 
No man hath walkt along our roads with step 
So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue 
So varied in discourse." 

One calls him a tawny lion crouched on Parnas- 
sus' Slope; and a critic in the British Quarterly 
says that Browning's work attests the tread of 
the firmest and surest foot that has waked the 
echoes from the difficult places of poetry and life 
since the early morning of English literature. So 
early as 1833, when Henry F. Chorley read ex- 
tracts from Browning's "Pauline," he recognized 
"the print of a man^s foot in the sand." 

VII. Browning's fairmindedness toward hu- 
manity and life and the universe is worth some- 
thing. He gives us lessons in doing justly and 



74 THE OPEN FIRE 

loving mercy by practicing and requiring a ju- 
dicial fairness toward all sorts and conditions of 
men. He compels a patient consideration of all 
sides in every case. He constitutes the reader 
into a court where, before the full bench of 
human faculties, causes and cases are laboriously 
heard and weighed. He requires of us, sitting on 
the judgment seat of life, a decision clearly just, 
or else suspension of sentence over the outcome 
of the complicated tangle of human motives ; see- 
ing that, as in the best there is something guilty, 
and in the greatest there is something weak, so 
also in the erring and the vicious there may be 
something good. He sets forth actual depravity, 
but affirms the possible saintliness of humanity. 
In "Gold-Hair, a Story of Pornic," he says to 
those who surmise that the Christian faith may 
be false, "I still see reasons to suppose it true; 
this, to begin with, 'Tis the faith that teaches 
original sin, the corruption of man's heart" ; true 
to the facts. In "Pippa Passes" he shows us, 
foiled against the sweet and songful innocence 
of Pippa, the possibility of an unmitigated villain 
in Bluphocks; but everywhere he handles indi- 
vidualities and actions with grave respect and 
deals with all fairly and hopefully. He gives 
the accused the benefit of the most skillful ad- 
vocacy in stating his case, and condemns only 
after impartial hearing. Yet he is as well a 
prophet of the judgment day. There is no maud- 
lin tenderness preventing a firm announcement 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 75 

of the stern and equitable verdict. He gives us 
awful glimpses of divine government and the ret- 
ributions of a moral law able to enforce itself. 
The code which Browning's court administers is 
God's code. As we read that powerful North 
Country story, "Halbert and Hob,'' we have to 
say with the French hospital visitor, who was 
looking at the physical effects of vice seen 
in some of the sufferers on the cots, "God Al- 
mighty writes a very plain hand." Again and 
again, in Browning's stories, we see heaven's 
lightning thrust its bright blade down through 
clouds and darkness to transfix the wickedness 
hiding thereunder. Evangelical readers have a 
further satisfaction in finding the whole poem of 
"Halbert and Hob" conclude upon man's need of 
supernatural influences to save him. The last 
lines are : 

"'Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?' O 
Lear, 
That a reason outside of nature must turn them soft 
seems clear!" 

In other places in his poems the evangelical cast 
of Browning's faith is visible. Moncure D. Con- 
way disputed with him in vain over the reference 
to "original sin — the corruption of man^s heart" 
at the end of "Gold-Hair." Unitarianism was 
pressed upon him by some clever people, among 
them Conway, who argued in the house and on 
the street against evangelicalism, the only result 



76 THE OPEN FIRE 

being that Browning listened with a queer look 
which made Conway feel that he was being zoolo- 
gized, scrutinized, and studied as if he were a sort 
of freak or strange specimen, the latest Harvard 
development in religion. 

VIII. Browning ennobles life by spiritualizing 
all its relationships. This appears supremely 
in the elevated and dignified manner in which he 
deals with the most powerful of human passions ; 
the passion which may lift man highest or drag 
him lowest according to the way it is managed. 
For the study of human passions Browning is a 
great and safe master, capable and chaste. Bir- 
rell says, "Browning is at the very front of the 
interpreters of human passion.'^ A keen ana- 
lyzer and powerful portrayer of the forces and 
frailties of human nature, he handles all purely. 
No one ever got smirch or taint from his pages, 
for they hold not a single leprous line. Nothing 
unclean goes up upon his highway, and the print 
of a satyr's hoof is not found thereon. With 
Browning love is always spiritual, as wdth Wil- 
liam Morris and many others in literature it is 
of the earth, earthy. He is too sturdy to dawdle 
with "the roses and raptures of passion," the 
"lilies and languors of love." There is nothing 
Anacreontic, no touch of mere amorousness or 
Swinburnian sensuousness. From all this he 
keeps further away than even Tennyson does. 

"Under a foot they cannot smutch 
He holds the fleshly and the bestial." 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 77 

His sculptured thought is as spotless white as 
Carrara marble, as pure as the Apollo Belvidere 
or Powers' Greek Slave. Now, this is doubtless 
partly due to the intellectuality and chivalric 
^high-mindedness of his own noble nature ; partly, 
also, let us reverently acknowledge, to the influ- 
ence of that hallowed union which was consum- 
mated w^hen Elizabeth Barrett in her forty-first 
year became his wife. That was a heavenly mar- 
riage hardly matched in human history. The 
first query of our wonder is. Did ever so strong a 
woman have for husband a man still stronger 
than herself? But this soon gives place to an- 
other : Did ever so high a man find a woman so 
entirely on his own height that for the joining of 
matrimonial hands he need not stoop nor she 
reach up ; a bride of such a stature as to meet her 
tall, unbending bridegroom's kiss wdth level lips. 
The soul of Robert Browning was sanctified by 
his ow^n experience of an ideally perfect human 
love. And w^hen his white hand laid down its 
guiltless pen at its last period, this w^as his illus- 
trious praise, secure in perpetuity : He wrote 
nothing she could wish to blot, no sentence upon 
which that "Lyric love, half angel and half bird," 
w^hom he apostrophizes with lifted and beseech- 
ing eyes as he commences "The Ring and the 
Book," might not from out her heavenly home 
smile down her benediction as he craved. 

IX. One of Browning's enduring values is 
that he is the poet for a lifetime, an author fit to 



78 THE OPEN FIRE 

live with for fifty years. It is worth whatever 
effort it may cost to arrange a high intellectual 
and spiritual alliance which can last. 

In the first place it requires a life-study for the 
full appreciation of Browning ; a casual acquain- 
tance cannot master, measure, or thoroughly un- 
derstand him. In the next place he furnishes 
material enough to last a lifetime. His flocks 
find extensive pasturage. He is not an author of 
one book, nor a singer immortal by a single poem, 
but the creator of a literature — twenty dense 
volumes resulting from nearly sixty years of 
assiduous authorship. Not only do the products 
of his fertile and unflagging genius constitute 
a literature in themselves, but upon this 
a second literature of criticism and com- 
mentary, varied, voluminous, and ever-increas- 
ing, has arisen, until the Browning biblio- 
graphy is in interest, ability, and bulk such 
as never gathered around the work of any other 
author in or near the period of his own life. And 
it seems likely that the nature of his themes and 
his manner of dealing with them, together with 
the present recoil of world-thought from mate- 
rialism and rationalism toward the spiritual and 
ethical and Christian, will make the growth of 
this literature as great in the future as in the 
past. 

Another thing which insures permanence for 
Browning is the simple naturalness of his spirit 
and the breadth of his sympathy. He is not 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 79 

aristocratic and exclusive; no dainty poet of a 
superior class like Matthew Arnold or even 
Clough, but in his spirit, a man for the masses. 
Nor is he the poet of a race like Tennyson, who 
is limited by being so distinctly Anglican. What 
we find in the Laureate is the culture and refine- 
ment of England's Victorian age. His ideas and 
their setting are of English type. Browning is 
unprovincial ; equally Greek, Italian, English; 
in fact cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world and 
of the centuries, thinking not in the dialect of one 
tribe, but in the language of mankind, so broadly 
human that he touches the universal and this uni- 
versality makes his work perennial. Even a 
petulant critic, vexed at excessive eulogies of 
Browning, involuntarily concedes enough to 
justify the strong encomiums in saying, "He is 
the greatest and least of singers, the least and the 
greatest of dramatists, the wisest and most fool- 
ish of philosophers; in a word he is ^all man- 
kind's epitome.- " What this critic says of in- 
equalities in Browning may, with some abate- 
ment, he conceded of him, as of all authors. No 
one contends that all that Browning has written 
is great. No man's poorest is very good. In the 
best and greatest we must cull and select. Even 
Homer nods and Shakespeare's worst is bad 
enough. Unevenness in Browning is conceded; 
nevertheless, for sustained cerebration he is 
matched by few. But the point we care for here 
is that a hostile critic ends by calling him "all 



80 THE OPEN FIRE 

mankind's epitome.'' Sidney Lanier, with a char- 
acteristically clever touch, calls the mocking-bird 
the Shakespeare of the feathered choirs because 
he "sums the woods in song" ; his "silver whist- 
lings" sample all bird lore and life. The Bard of 
Avon is called myriad-minded, but scarcely more 
deserves to be so crowned than does the author 
who in his "One Word More to E. B. B.," bids her 
take his "fifty men and women." Certain are we 
that except in Shakespeare no gallery of char- 
acters is found in poetry so large, significant, and 
rich as Browning's. So great and varied is his 
range that it is less extravagant than Richard 
Steele's tribute to Lady Elizabeth Hastings, for 
us to say that a complete knowledge of Brown- 
ing is a liberal education. 

Again, Browning is a permanency because he 
is not discarded by the advancing seasons of the 
student's life. Aubrey De Vere tells us that his 
youthful enthusiasm for Byron fell away "like a 
bond broken by being outgrown"; and he ex- 
changed Byron for Wordsworth, whom he con- 
sidered the greatest poet of his century. W. T. 
Stead testifies that in youth he was captivated by 
Scott's poems. First, he read "The Lay of the 
Last Minstrel" ; later, "Marmion" and "The Lady 
of the Lake"; and then "Scott's charm was ex- 
hausted ; he interested me no more." Philip Gil- 
bert Hamerton also wrote : "To a youth who be- 
comes thoughtful, Scott is insufficient." Henry 
James once said that Tennyson has been tacitly 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 81 

classed as a poet whom one thinks most of while 
one's taste is immature; and that yonng persons 
of twenty read Tennyson ; while young persons of 
thirty or forty or over read Browning. Maarten 
Maartens speaks of Schiller as a young man's 
poet, and adds that every young German goes 
through a Don Carlos period when he schtvarms 
for the political ideals represented by the Mar- 
quis of Posa — from which he presently recovers. 
Bliss Carman thinks that "Hiawatha'' is the only 
one of Longfellow's poems that retains its charm 
after the reader has reached the critical stage. 
Now, with Browning the reader's experience is 
entirely different. The strong and passionless 
intellectuality of mature middle life does not lay 
him aside as it does, for example, the foamy and 
sensational poetry of ardors and fervors and 
fondlings. He is not caviare to that post-meri- 
dian sobriety which on the one hand has lost in- 
terest in love-lorn languishings, and on the other 
cannot endure the moaning and sighing of young- 
gentlemen who are sad for very wantonness, and 
of singers who mope so picturesquely and who 
say, like the youthful Samuel Rogers, 

"There's such a charm in melancholy, 
I would not if I could be gay." 

This is partly due to our poet's longevity. He 
sang to men out of six decades. He is not one of 
those short-lived singers, of whom there have been 
many whose early death bequeathed us only the 



82 THE OPEN FIRE 

bloom-poetry of youth, which, however fine, fra- 
grant, luxuriant, and delicate, or fiery and pas- 
sionately powerful, cannot have certain qualities 
of universality and perpetuity. Keats, Shelley, 
Byron, Lanier, and many others died young. 
Browning, with full and sustained vitality, lived 
and sang on almost to fourscore. Their poetry is 
of the morning, and leaves the query wandering 
in our minds, "What would they have written in 
life's noon and afternoon and evening?" Nor 
do we know but that "the mediocrity of middle 
life," against which Margaret Fuller warns us, 
might have smothered their fire. Oliver Wendell 
Holmes wrote to young Thomas Bailey Aldrich : 
"Our poets do not ripen well — they are larks in 
the morning, sparrows at noon, and owls before 
evening." 

Browning's poetry is for all periods of human 
life because written from all periods, and that too 
without any sign of decadence or abatement of 
force. Huxley wrote in 1893 : "A great propor- 
tion of poetry is addressed by the young to the 
young. Only the great masters of the art are 
capable of divining, or think it worth while to 
enter into, the feelings of retrospective age. Two 
great poets, Tennyson and Browning, have done 
this, each in his own inimitable way, the one in 
the ^Ulysses,' the other in that wonderful frag- 
ment, ^Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came.' " 
In this connection we cannot refrain from re- 
marking how richly fortunate were the genera- 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 83 

tions which looked on three such old men as 
Browning, Tennyson, and Whittier, nearly of an 
age, haloed with white hair and the glory of pure 
lives, crowned with the laurels of high poetic 
fame. 

For the individual student who adopts him, 
Browning may be called the ultimate poet, be- 
cause no one graduates from him to a higher. No 
superior master arrives to alienate the pupil's 
affections. Browning's congregation is not de- 
pleted by proselyting; whom he gains he keeps. 
The love of him is fatal and final ; "till death us 
do part" is the formula which weds author and 
disciple. Indeed, whoever falls under his power 
is so held with hooks of steel that he is not likely 
to get away "while life, and thought, and being 
last or immortality endures." No ripening of 
faculty, no elevation or enlargement of mental or 
moral life will take him out of the zones which 
Browning inhabits, for our poet not only occu- 
pies the earth but annexes the heavens. Who- 
ever joins company with him has found a com- 
rade spirit whom he cannot outsoar in this world 
or any other. It is worth while to put Browning 
into your library, because once admitted the 
volumes are on the shelf to stay, not to be weeded 
out in later years. 

A Browning enthusiast and a Browning skep- 
tic traveled through the Holy Land and Europe 
together. One April day, on horseback, riding 
over Beth-horon toward Jerusalem, the enthusi- 



84 THE OPEN FIRE 

ast recited "Herve Riel'' ; and there came a spark 
of kindled fire into the skeptic's eye and an il- 
lumination into his face betokening a thrill of 
keen pleasure in his mind. On a July afternoon, 
in that same year, in an hour of rest, after cross- 
ing the Furca and Grimsel passes, in that spot 
of wild, bleak, and gloomy Alpine environment, 
the Grimsel Hospice, the enthusiast read aloud 
that tender and holy poem, ^'One Word More," 
and there came on the face of the Browning skep- 
tic a look of awe, like the air of one who is moved 
to worship and in his eyes a mixture of light and 
dew. From that hour he was a captive. He dis- 
covered that no poet of any age had so much with 
which his own robust mind and buoyant spirit 
would have affinity as the author of "Rabbi Ben 
Ezra," which Gilbert Haven called the noblest 
lyric of life ever written. The skeptic who was 
convicted on Beth-horon and converted in the 
Grimsel Hospice was over thirty years a bishop, 
fitly enough the mountain-bishop, pitching his 
episcopal tent on the flanks of the Rockies, and 
Robert Browning was for Bishop Warren nolens 
volens the ultimate poet. 

X. Robert Browning is the poet of faith and 
faith's inalienable good cheer, of immense value 
against the wretched singers of unfaith with its 
weary woe. It is no small reason for thanksgiv- 
ing that the strongest hand that has struck the 
muses' lyre in our time is firmly Christian. This 
great classicist, the author of "Agamemnon," 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 85 

"Balaustion's Adventure" and "Aristophanes' 
Apology," is Christian to the core. His classi- 
cism does not paganize him. He loves Greek mas- 
terpieces, Greek heroes, Greek history, and 
Greek thought, but believes that there is more of 
the power and wisdom of God in Jesus Christ 
than in "all the old philosophies that ever sang 
on Argive heights." 

The absence of any noble and invigorating 
faith makes much of modern poetry clammy, 
chilly, and dejected. When irreligion does not 
run to levity or coarseness, its tendency is to 
steep literature in sadness. For example, most 
of William Morris' work is overhung by that 
cloud of melancholy that shadows his ''Earthly 
Paradise," in which he calls himself "the idle 
singer of an empty day," piping to the suitable 
accompaniment of wild December winds. An- 
drew Lang has said that doubt and painful skep- 
ticism inform William Morris' earlier poems, and 
the burden of his long narrative poems is vanitas 
vanitatum, the fleeting, unsatisfying nature of 
human existence, the perishable dream "rounded 
by a sleep." A similar gloom pervades the writ- 
ings of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose "House of 
Life" is a dreary and haunted domicile. The fine 
sweet soul of Arthur Hugh Clough doubts too 
much for cheerfulness. Even in Alfred Tenny- 
son the mournful tone too often predominates. 
The "Idylls of the King" are intensely sorrow- 
ful. Listen to the verses beginning "Flow down 



86 THE OPEN FIRE 

cold rivulet to the cold sea''; and those others, 
"Break, break, break at the foot of thy crags"; 
or to the dreamy regretful song of "The Lotus 
Eaters" ; or to the pitiful dirge of passionate de- 
spair wailed out to the crags of Mount Ida by the 
desolate CEnone. Although the great laureate 
ranked unquestionably on the Christian side and 
was a lifelong student of the Bible, to which it is 
said three hundred references are made in his 
poems, yet the tone of his faith is not so buoyant 
and wholesome as we could wish. There is here 
and there a tinge of eighteenth-century philo- 
sophic unbelief and nineteenth-century scientific 
skepticism. He is an apostle of uncertainty who 
often does no more than "stretch lame hands of 
faith and grope and faintly trust." The London 
Spectator says: "Tennyson's tremulous faith 
utters itself with a faltering voice and in a sort of 
sob." Browning's faith was robust; it was not 
"perpetual unbelief kept quiet." When Tenny- 
son was asked what his religion was, he used to 
say: "Read ^In Memoriam'; I have written it 
there." In "In Memoriam" are dubious shadows, 
where spiritual realities seem more ghostly than 
substantial; and the serious charge is made 
against it, that "In it one finds chiefly vain re- 
grets and vain lamentations, an utter prostration 
of will and a total absence of that moral power 
which alone can triumph over misfortune." In 
not a few of his works are dim passages where 
Faith walks with fear and trembling, treading on 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 87 

things that hiss and squirm and coil about her 
feet, and sometimes draw blood. But the chief 
poet of skepticism is Matthew Arnold, whose 
writings consist largely of variations on one 
theme — the irreconcilable divorce between the 
intellect and the soul, the hopeless inability of 
reason to keep company with faith. Arnold 
voices the sickly and feverish unrest of his age, 
its moral distresses, its intellectual bewilderment 
and hesitations, its spiritual debility and tremu- 
lousness. He wears with proud, sad majesty, 
like a crown of thorns, the consciousness of his 
own superior endowments, being cursed with that 
exceptional clearness of vision which cannot help 
perceiving that faith is superstition. He hears 
the ocean of belief withdrawing like an ebbing 
tide on Dover Beach. To us Arnold's dealing 
with the pressing problems of life and thought 
seems painfully weak and superficial, with no re- 
sult but repining and despair, and no remedy or 
relief suggested except the cold serenity of stoic 
fortitude. 

From all this it is an ineffable comfort to turn 
to the master-singer of the century, of whom 
Professor C. T. Winchester, one of the most cor- 
rect and capable of American critics, writes: 
"If there be one English poet who above all others 
through the last twenty years, in a doubting and 
denying generation, has kept robust faith in the 
great spiritual verities ; one poet whose verse has 
been filled with 'the power of an endless life/ 



88 THE OPEN FIRE 

that poet is Browning. Of him men in after 
times will surely say, as he himself in one of his 
later poems predicts, ^He at least believed in soul, 
was very sure of God.' " A great English critic 
once said that the two men of the nineteenth 
century who most firmly believed that Jesus 
Christ is God were John Henry Newman and 
Robert Browning. The exaggeration is based in 
truth. The conviction of Browning's lifetime is 
in his tremendous lines : 

"I say, the acknowledgment of God in Christ, 
Accepted by thy reason, solves for thee 
All questions in the earth and out of it, 
And hath so far advanced thee to be wise." 

The men of science, making a new world, and the 
critics a new Bible, did not disturb his faith. 
Where is the actuary who can appraise the value 
of such a man to an age described by John Stuart 
Mill as one of ^'weak convictions, paralyzed intel- 
lects, and growing laxity of opinions"? 

Surrounded by the forlorn and lugubrious 
poets of modern doubt — Matthew Arnold with his 
sad unbelief, James Thomson with his bald athe- 
ism, Swinburne with his ribald scalding blas- 
phemies, and Edwin Arnold with his excessive 
glorification of paganism — the faith of Sakya 
Muni — good Robert Browning towers, like his 
own Hercules in "Balaustion's Adventure,'' a 
strong and splendid figure. To the cold marble 
halls of literature w^here these moping poets weep 
and wail as at the funeral of faith, he comes as, 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 89 

we are told (in "Balaustion's Adventure'^), Her- 
cules came to the sorrowing house of Admetos, 
bereft of Alkestis. The hero with a lion skin 
covering his mighty shoulders and an irresisti- 
ble, sound, wholesome heart within, nearing the 
thresholds sends his voice before him to herald 
through the gloomy hall the arrival of a helper 
not wholly undivine: 

"A great voice! 
Oh the thrill that runs through us! 

Never was aught so good as that great interrupting voice! 
And sudden into the midst of sorrow leaps, 
Along with the gay cheer of that great voice, 
Hope, joy, salvation: Hercules is here!" 

Such a presence, such a voice is Browning's, 
and they mean the same — hope, joy, salvation. It 
is not surprising that Mary Grace Walker, in the 
London Academy, bears testimony to Browning 
thus : 

"This yoke was laid upon me in my youth, 
To long for faith yet be enslaved by doubt. 
I called, but there was none to answer me. 
Till, bearer of the two-edged sword of truth. 
He came and drove the lurking demon out 
That late possessed my soul, and set me free." 

It is not surprising that a lady who believed 
herself near to death wrote to Browning to thank 
him for the spiritual aid his poems had given her, 
telling him hoAv it strengthened her to find so 
highly gifted a man of genius holding firmly to 
the great truths of revealed religion and espe- 
cially to a belief in immortality. Browning, in a 



90 THE OPEN FIRE 

quick reply to the dying woman, assured her that 
he saw ever more and more reason to hold by that 
great hope, though nowise ignorant of all that 
skeptics have advanced against it. He told her 
that on these questions he had been aware of the 
communication of something more subtle than a 
ratiocinative process, and mighty convictions had 
thrilled his soul to its depth. "As when Napo- 
leon, shutting up the New Testament said of 
Christ : ^Do you know that I am an understander 
of men? Well, He was no mere man.' " 

An American writer, spokesman for multi- 
tudes of grateful hearts on our side of the sea, 
speaking of the soul's dark days of faintness and 
fear, when evil fancies hover and life seems a 
waste, and death brings its cold shadow on, 
wrote to Browning thus : In such stranded hours, 

*'Some stream of thy great songs will touch and lift 
My feet and bear me — till triumphantly 
On floods of glorious faith I ride past rift, 
Past shoal and cataract, and out to sea; 
And mingled with those conquering currents' drift, 
Sink soft on rest. Thy songs, they solace me." 

Another gives thanks to Browning thus: 

"Thou art so sure! What spirit brings 
Thee surety? Others hope; thou say'st 'I know 
The spirit is immortal.' And for thy confidence 
In that which was our mother's ground of trust 
We thank thee — thou, so nobly learn'd, so just 
In judgment, thought, and feeling; so intense 
In all that makes a man. We give thee praise 
And thanks, thou trusting soul, midst doubting days." 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 91 

We are told of a gifted and ardent woman who 
once said that when everything else failed she 
read : "Saul" ; and then she heard once more the 
clear tone of faith calling through the darkness 
as the song of the shepherd boy called to King 
Saul in the blackness of his despair. 

XI. Browning's character and life and works 
stand together in the unison of a perfect har- 
mony, full of inspiration, courage, and help for 
mankind. Looking on him we take from "Co- 
lombe's Birthday" his own words to describe him 
through all the years of his life : 

"He gathers earth's whole good into his arms, 
Standing as man now stately, strong, and wise. 
With a great aim like guiding-star above 
Which tasks strength, wisdom, stateliness to lift 
His manhood to the height that takes the prize." 

Having lived long, pursuing lofty designs in 
this great fashion, how is it with this high man 
when he comes to make an end? No drooping, 
no faltering; superbly he keeps his level. This 
strong runner, who never yet found horsemen 
that could weary him, is a brave swimmer, una- 
fraid of the swellings of Jordan. Nothing could 
be more royally characteristic than the final ap- 
pearance of the nineteenth century's greatest 
poet. It is "Prospice" over again. 

In the epilogue of Asolando, the last book of 
his many-volumed life, just moist from the press, 
when our eyes perusing it were moistened at tid- 
ings of his death, the silver-haired poet forbids 



92 THE OPEN FIRE 

that we, in midnight mood, surrounded by the 
silence of the sleep-time, shall think pityingly of 
the spot where his form lies low, as if he w^ere, 
according to the fancy of fools, imprisoned in 
the grave; and commands that in bright noon- 
day mood and in the full swing of man's work- 
time, scarce pausing in the bustle of our action, 
we greet for him the unseen with a cheer; that 
with our expectation and our wishes we bid him 
God-speed mounting upward, and believe that 
yonder, worlds away, where the strange and new 
have birth, in the heaven's height, far and steep, 
he still strives and thrives, fights on, fares ever 
there as here. Lower thoughts in our minds 
than these concerning him would be to him, he 
says, an affront and dishonor undeserved, because 
on earth he had nothing to do with the slothful, 
or the mawkish, or the unmanly, never driveled 
like the aimless and the helpless and the hopeless. 
Rather was he 

"One that never turned his back but marched breast for- 
ward, 

Never doubted clouds would break; 

Never dreamed when right seemed worsted that wrong 
could triumph; 

Held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better, and at last 

We only sleep to wake." 

In this final message to mankind on earth, we 
hear the dear familiar and sonorous voice, un- 
changed in spite of almost eighty years, rich, 
clear, and powerful as ever; the same buoyancy 



VALUES IN ROBERT BROWNING 93 

of spiritual certitude, the same blissful and jubi- 
lant sense of surely imperishable existence, the 
same unwearied psychic energy, the same intre- 
pid faith, the same sympathy with glorious ac- 
tion in preference to repose, the same warm, 
strong, earnest, manful lovingness. 

The two wondrous poems which close Asolando 
—the "Reverie" and the "Epilogue"— certify to 
us that existence meant to Robert Browning at 
the last just what it meant at the first, when, at 
the age of twenty-three, he wrote in Paracelsus 
words which were favorite with Chinese Gordon 
and are worthy to be favorite with us all : 

"I go to prove my soul! 
I see my way as birds their trackless way; 
I shall arrive: what time, what circuit first 
I know not. But some time. 
In God's good time. I shall arrive. 
He guides me and the birds. In His good time!" 



THE DOUBLE SKY 

Above man's life there are two skies : one the 
visible firmament over his head, with its innumer- 
able suns and systems; the other the spiritual 
heavens above the soul in which the great re- 
vealed realities of the spirit world swing and 
shine. 

In sight of these two skies was written the 
nineteenth psalm, the psalm of the Double Sky, 
which begins with the firmament declaring the 
glory of God and ends with the true and right- 
eous law of the Lord, converting the soul, rejoic- 
ing the heart, and enlightening the eyes. 

Into this Double Sky the great German phil- 
osopher Immanuel Kant was reverently looking 
when he said, "Two things fill me with admira- 
tion and awe, the starry heavens and the moral 
law." 

Man's capacity for recognizing and exploring 
the Double Sky is what differentiates him from 
the brute and marks him as a child of God, aware 
of, and allied to, things above. Max Mtiller says 
that the ancients derived the Greek w^ord "An- 
thropos (man) fromd avcj a^pcjv — he who looks 
upward"; and adds that, whether this deriva- 
tion be true or not, "certain it is that what 
makes man to be a, man is that he alone can turn 

94 



THE DOUBLE SKY 95 

his face to heaven ; he alone of earthly creatures 
yearns for something more and higher than either 
sense or reason can supply." Wordsworth pic- 
tures the old Cumberland Beggar with "the 
heaven-regarding eye and front sublime which 
man is born to/' Ovid remarked that "the coun- 
tenance of man directed on high bids him con- 
sider things above." 

Not to consider the Double Sky is to live a low 
life and incur infinite loss. Looking back over 
history and speaking of the decline of nations, 
Lacordaire said, "The earth has devoured all 
those who no longer regarded heaven save as the 
physical eye discovers it on the horizon." The 
lower sky is for man's eye. The upper sky is for 
man's soul, and not without regarding it can man 
or nation prosper. 

Strangely enough, this creature, so obviously 
intended to look up, and with so much above him 
to invite his gaze, is prone to keep his eyes fixed 
on the ground. The ordinary desires of our race 
are dejected to the earth, and our highest natural 
ambitions are projected on the level of the carnal 
mind and the temporal and temporary life. The 
human creature so habitually goes about so stoop- 
shouldered and down-visaged that some observers 
have taken the liberty to tell him that he is only 
a higher order of brute, as he would be if he never 
looked up. This down-cast, low-lived habit seems 
so odd and incongruous in a being with man's 
powers that it is reasonable to regard it as an 



96 THE OPEN FIRE 

unnatural depravity, a mysterious deflection 
and degradation of his nature from its intended 
direction. Under this earthward slant and pitch 
and plunge of human tendency, special reasons 
can often be perceived, which, in various cases, 
help to explain the reluctance to look up. 

First, then, are those who do not want to ad- 
mit convictions that might condemn and disturb 
their present way of life. 

The heavenly bodies are exacting; they claim 
to rule. Sun, moon, and stars require man to set 
his time-piece by their movements and arrange 
the schedule of his life in accordance with the 
changes and seasons they ordain — with the day 
and night, spring, summer, autumn, and w^in- 
ter they decree. In like manner the supreme spir- 
itual realities require us to conform, they give 
laws and set the time for our action and life. 

Again, there are others whose upward possi- 
bilities are weighted down with the inertia of a 
low" contentment so that they have no desire for 
fellowship with or knowledge of high things, but 
are entirely satisfied to live like beasts — to go on 
all fours in the dirt — and, beyond that, wdsh 
only to be permitted to die like beasts and be 
buried with the burial of an ass. Their chosen 
manner of life, far more than their anatomy, in- 
timates their brotherhood with the brutes. 

And yet again, there are some who are kept 
from giving any attention to the higher facts 
of man's existence because they have, explicitly 



THE DOUBLE SKY 97 

or virtually, taken a position of antagonism to 
the views which assert those facts and which 
insist upon them as urgent, imperative, and su- 
preme. We remember that when Galileo, first of 
men, had seen in the purple sky of Florence, 
through his "poor little spyglass,'^ the moons of 
Jupiter, there was a scientific professor at Padua 
who refused to look through the telescope lest he 
should see Jupiter's satellites, which he didn't 
wish to see because he had declared his disbelief 
in their existence. 

But the things which are above are too great to 
be ignored. They are to be studied. The sky, 
whether physical or moral, whether is meant the 
firmament overhead or the heaven oversoul, is so 
wonderful that when the thoughtful man becomes 
aware of it he must also grow observant and stu- 
dious toward it. Nor is observation useless, for he 
who studies with the aids afforded shall, in the 
one case as in the other, assuredly learn. Even 
though there be in his thinking much that is crude 
and ungainly, yet even the intellectual blunders 
of the studious man may be entitled to respect 
and not obstructive of essential truth. What 
could seem more absurd than the constellations 
which the science of astronomy, for the systema- 
tizing and furtherance of its work, chalks upon 
the sky? Yet are they sacred inasmuch as they 
are serviceable; for even such fanciful figures 
projected by a primitive imagination do not in- 
terfere with accurate knowledge, but actually 



98 THE OPEN FIRE 

facilitate its requirement. In like manner man's 
religious fancies, even when crudest, may at least 
serve to hold his studious and earnest face 
toward heaven and give God's stars a chance to 
shine into the bottom of his soul. The fact that 
Chinese Gordon's theological thinking was pro- 
jected in outline almost as grotesque in some 
things as the dragon, dolphin, centaur, and uni- 
corn of astronomy, did not prevent him from such 
distinct and intelligent vision of the bright star- 
points of celestial truth as made of him a hero 
and a saint. Without in the least depreciating 
the value of valid thought and correct outline, it 
may be gratefully admitted that through the 
strangest shapes of human thinking saving truth 
may shine down to the sincere, up-looking, in- 
dividual spirit. As Neander truly says, "God 
meets the aspirations of the truth-seeking soul 
even in its error." 

Bright and splendid as the heavens are, count- 
less and lustrous as are the glorious orbs that roll 
therein, it is quite possible to live under them 
altogether ignorant and indifferent toward them. 
Even some who count themselves learned, and 
who are so on a low level and within narrow lim- 
its, see fit to ignore or deride the sky. There 
have been a few undevout students and teachers 
of natural science. Now for science which stays 
on its reservation and minds its own business we 
have profound respect, and in its final conclu- 
sions, not in its tentative hypotheses, the utmost 



THE DOUBLE SKY 99 

faith. We are eager to say with Charles Kings- 
ley, "The laws of nature must reveal God, what- 
ever else does not; and man's scientific conquest 
of nature must be one phase of his kingdom on 
earth, whatever else is not." But for scientists 
who blaspheme against the Creator in his own 
vast temple, who manifest a propensity to leave 
their proper work in order to pronounce sentence 
of death on some Christian doctrine or on reli- 
gion itself, we feel the utmost impatience. When, 
for instance, a scientist bids us give up the per- 
sonality of God as an effete anthropomorphism, 
and accept, in place of this Divine Personality, a 
cosmic force, or impersonal law, or an eternal 
life-principle, or a "superpersonal omnipres- 
ence," or any other similar invention and make- 
shift, we suffer a shuddering chill. Why should 
physical science curl the lip at religion and the- 
ology? Is not science itself obtained and 
achieved, as Bowne used to say, by cognitive ac- 
tivities which rest on postulates that admit of no 
proof beyond their value in satisfying the needs 
and demands of our total nature? Does not sci- 
ence trust to the pure assumption that these pos- 
tulates are true because they do so satisfy our 
nature? Well, it is a central need of man's na- 
ture that he should be allowed to go on saying 
"Our Father," as Jesus Christ tells him to do. 
An infinite and eternal Personality, having in- 
telligence, consciousness, affection, and will, is 
a necessity of our religious nature if not also of 



100 THE OPEN FIRE 

our mental constitution. The scientist who im- 
agines our living Christianity to be defunct and 
dances round the giant faith with a tape-measure, 
begging it to stand still long enough to be meas- 
ured for its coffin ; who keeps driving a hearse up 
to the church door, expecting the cold remains 
of religion to be brought out for burial ; the scien- 
tist attempting the role of undertaker toward the 
sanctities of revelation and of the human soul, is 
a weariness to flesh and spirit both. Christian- 
ity, receiving notice of the obsequies, simply 
sends word that it hasn't time to be buried, being 
so busy conquering the world that it cannot pos- 
sibly take a day off to attend the proposed fu- 
neral, and, in fact, though that great funeral has 
been frequently announced, the undertakers have 
never been able to catch the corpse, which is a 
mighty angel inhabiting the sky and flying over 
the earth on wings, while its pursuers have only 
clumsy feet, which mire at every step. Won't 
somebody please telephone the undevout astron- 
omers and all the ilk of anti-religious scientists 
that it is quite too early to arrange for the obse- 
quies of Christianity? Two Irish laborers were 
at work on a building. One told the other of a 
smart and saucy infidel who had lectured in the 
town. "What did he say?" says Mike. "Why, he 
says Christianity is dead," answered Pat. "Well, 
it's a mighty quare dead thing that's building 
five churches in this town this very year." It 
might be well for the coroner to call Mike as one 



THE DOUBLE SKY 101 

of the jury when the inquest is held over Chris- 
tianity, for at least he knows the symptoms of 
life and can tell the difference between a live 
thing and a dead thing. As for all undevout and 
godless learning, all culture w^hich is of the earth 
earthy — merely mundane and not cosmic, terres- 
trial and excluding the celestial — the only sym- 
bolically proper place for its university is down 
in the dark caverns of the Mammoth Cave, where, 
secure from the annoying intrusion of the light 
of other worlds, they may successfully teach the 
folly of those who believe in a sky, and where the 
bats and the mice and the eyeless fish may be 
trained to join with them in their agnostic chant, 
and conjugate their "ignoramus," "We don't 
know ; you don't know ; nobody knows." And the 
department of astronomy should be put in charge 
of some wise old mole with powerful jaws, a pene- 
trative snout, and undiscoverable eyes, whose 
first lecture on astronomy should begin thus : 
"Astronomy! My beloved pupils, there can be 
no such science as astronomy; for there are no 
other worlds but this ; therefore w^e will take up 
the sublime science of burrowing, study the glori- 
ous movements of our cousins the earthworms, 
and consider how noble is their destiny and ours 
— to bore a hole in the ground, crawl into it and 
die happy in the magnanimous and altruistic 
thought that our precious carcasses will enrich 
the soil and fatten the generation that comes 
crawling after us." 



102 THE OPEN FIRE 

There are not wanting a few who seem to have 
a spite against celestial things and would fain ex- 
tinguish all faith in the starry realities which 
light the firmament of the human soul. Carlyle 
pictures a conjurer denouncing the stars and try- 
ing to squirt them to death with a syringe filled 
with mud and dirty water, which he aims at the 
zenith ; the sole result being that the conjurer and 
his friends are badly spattered with falling mud 
and foul water. Of such conjurers the most rab- 
idly spiteful in our day was Nietzsche, who cried 
out to his comrades : "I conjure you, my brethren, 
remain true to the earth, and do not believe those 
who speak to you of supernatural hopes I They 
are poisoners, whether they know it or not. They 
are despisers of life, decaying ones and poisoned 
ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary ; let 
them begone I" In Byron and Bradlaugh and 
Blatchford there is something of this bitterness 
against things high and holy, as also in Edgar 
A. Poe, w^ho is reported to have said once that 
his whole nature revolted from the idea that there 
existed any being superior to himself I And he 
said only what many act. His life shows with 
tragic completeness how insufficient was this 
enormous self-sufficiency for any good to him- 
self or others. Little enough basis had even he 
for such mad inflated intellectual pride ; and piti- 
able enough was the phenomenal misery he suc- 
ceeded in achieving for himself. 

It is better to study the sky than to ignore 



THE DOUBLE SKY 103 

it, for it is just as real as the ground. It is more 
seemly to be in love with it than to hate it, for 
we and all men are its daily debtors. Influences 
and gifts immeasurable come from above. Our 
day comes down to us and all growth is by its 
assistance, for growth is largely by celestial trac- 
tion. The sky pulls the seed up into stalk and 
the acorn up out of the black forest loam. It 
is not done without the up- tug of the force that 
reaches down. We owe all food, in a measure, 
to the sky. The "dear blue" above us contributes 
to the ripe result of the harvests around us. Bread 
is manna without a miracle, since partly it falls 
from the sky. It is now known that all physical 
or vital energy at work on the surface of this 
planet comes from the sun. Every drop of water 
that falls, every wave that beats, every wind 
that blows, every creature that moves here, one 
and all are animated and sustained by that mys- 
terious effluence we call the sunbeam. And no 
man knows how it is done, nor even how that tre- 
mendous power is transmitted across the ninety- 
two millions of miles of space between sun and 
earth. Furthermore, we know that the sun is 
continually flinging on this earth magnetic dis- 
turbances which run periods of a solar day, a 
solar year, and a solar cycle. In these magnetic 
storms the heavens literally seize the earth by 
its poles and shake it. Such well-known facts as 
these are not made less certain by being profound 
and inexplicable mysteries. 



104 THE OPEN FIRE 

Now, our religion affirms just the same to be 
true of the spiritual sky which pours and pulses 
on man's soul a mighty and moving influence. 
The Sun of Righteousness is shedding his quick- 
ening beams upon the world of humanity, and 
unseen forces from above are acting upon the 
moral life of men and nations. More and more 
it becomes apparent that the earth is powerfully 
affected by the heavens. In fact, spiritually as 
well as physically, this world is run by sky- 
power. 

Whether planets and stars in our sky are in- 
habited we do not with certainty know. But na- 
tive human instincts affirm a peopled region 
above our souls, a spiritual realm populous and 
palpitant with life. In Georgia, John Wesley, 
conversing with the Indian chief Paustoobee, 
asked him concerning the religion of his people, 
and was answered, "We believe there are four 
sacred things above — the clouds, the sun, the 
clear sky, and He who lives in the clear sky." No 
belief is more Christian than this of inhabited 
heavens, and those pagan aborigines were at 
least facing in the Christian direction. Inhab- 
ited heavens, coming now and then into view and 
hearing, are a part of the historic setting of 
Christianity in the Old and New Testaments. 
The skies above Bethlehem broke into song when 
a company of the heavenly hosts appeared and 
sang. When Jesus was baptized at the fords of 
the Jordan a voice was heard speaking out of 



THE DOUBLE SKY 105 

heaven. And the sky was vocal when Peter and 
James and John were with the Master on the 
Mount of Transfiguration. All religions worthy 
of the name declare that the skies under which 
man lives are attentive and responsive. Between 
the human soul and the heavens there is tele- 
phonic communication. In the inner office of 
man's nature is a sensitive instrument wired into 
connection with the infinite, and often when he is 
alone and all is still he can hear fragments as of 
conversation going past on the wires. Sometimes 
he hears something like the goings on in an of- 
fice of government, orders being sent out : "Thou 
Shalt" and "Thou shalt not"; and the voice of 
what some call the Imperative Absolute dis- 
tinctly recognizable. Such things even an indif- 
ferent listener may sometimes hear when he is 
all alone with his conscience. The moment of 
happy intelligence is when one learns that this 
great Authoritative Voice is not roaming at ran- 
dom, nor calling past him on a party wire, but 
has a message for him; when he understands 
that the bell which strikes in his own soul means 
that he himself is called, realizes that it is a sig- 
nal from the celestial Central Office that Some- 
one whom no distance can put far off wishes to 
speak to him ; and when he puts the spiritual re- 
ceiver close to his ear and listens reverently to 
the mysterious Voice from out the unseen. 
Surely it is a momentous hour when any soul be- 
comes aware of the heavens and conscious of a 



106 THE OPEN FIRE 

personal relation therewith. A few historic pic- 
tures may illustrate and illuminate the signifi- 
cance of such an hour. 

Once, long ago, there was a rich man who held 
a fat office under the Roman government as tax 
collector at Jericho. Zacchaeus had never paid any 
attention to the sky above his soul till one day he 
climbed a sycamore tree and clung there among 
the branches above the heads of a crowd to see 
a Man arrive. But behold, it was no mere man 
that approached, but a new day that broke over 
him. Sunrise came along the road in the person 
of One who when he lets his glory blaze is bright 
enough to light up all heaven beyond the need of 
sun, or moon, or stars. Sunrise went home with 
Zacchseus, illuminated his house, sat at his table, 
shone into his soul. Sunrise, spiritual sunrise, 
poured the light of day on his dishonest life, and 
he stood in the exposure, ashamed, alarmed, and 
penitent. Thenceforth he took care that the 
watching heavens, of which he had just become 
aware, should look down on a clean life and an 
honest soul that could bear to have the light 
turned on, and could even sit vis-a-vis with the 
Sunrise-Christ undismayed because unrebuked. 

A certain Jerusalem thief never knew what 
was above his soul till the authorities got hold 
of him, drove spikes through his hands and feet, 
and hung him up between heaven and earth. 
Then he saw such a light in the face of the One 
on the cross next to his that he discovered God, 



THE DOUBLE SKY 107 

repented, prayed, and mounted into paradise that 
very day. 

Before the apostle to the Gentiles died he was 
pretty well acquainted with the heavens, first, 
second, third, but Saul of Tarsus was a long time 
getting any correct knowledge of spiritual as- 
tronomy. Gamaliel did not teach it in his school, 
or if he did, it was on a false conception, Jewish, 
not Christian, a wrong center, Ptolemaic, not 
Copernican. After the youth from Tarsus had 
finished school he one day enjoyed the pleasure 
of seeing a young man stoned. He stood by and 
held the outer garments of those who were pelt- 
ing the life out of innocent Stephen ; and stand- 
ing right there he failed to see the open heaven 
into which the bruised martyr steadfastly looked". 
Too stupid was the Tarsan to guess whence came 
the light which glorified that bleeding face into 
angelic beauty. When they had pounded the 
pure soul out of its broken body he handed back 
their coats to the panting and perspiring stoners, 
and went his Pharisaic way, still unconscious 
that He who sitteth at the right hand of God was 
watching and purposing to deal with him right 
mightily ere long. He went on through the years 
and never really knew what was overhead, until 
one day, when his heart was still one of the dark 
corners of the earth and full of cruelty, all at 
once, near Damascus, the long neglected and mis- 
understood heavens began to blaze at him indig- 
nantly and talk to him with articulate message. 



108 THE OPEN FIRE 

He fell to the ground, listened to the message, 
and made reverent response. Awe-struck, daz- 
zled, tremulous, and pale from his celestial inter- 
view, he groped his dim way into the city. The 
most violent adversary of Christianity was trans- 
formed into its most valiant advocate by listen- 
ing to what the heavens had to say; a transfor- 
mation which even the infidel Baur declares a 
miracle, and Lord Lyttelton said that the conver- 
sion and apostleship of Paul is of itself sufficient 
to prove Christianity a divine revelation. From 
that time he followed a high calling, and whether 
he was being let down the wall in a basket, or 
making Felix tremble, or explaining to Agrippa 
how he came to be a Christian, or lecturing the 
Athenians, or rebuking the Corinthians, or tak- 
ing command of a storm-driven ship, or shak- 
ing off vipers into the fire, or writing love letters 
to Timothy, or following the headsman out the 
Ostian gate, or kneeling for the death stroke — all 
his life he felt himself talked to and watched over 
from on high. 

It is recorded how the spiritual heavens talked 
above a New England country tavern one night in 
1807. Toward evening a young man rides up on 
horseback at the door of the village inn to stop 
over night. Look at him, for he is remarkable. 
He graduated not long before from Brown Uni- 
versity at the head of his class, an avowed in- 
fidel, the boon companion of skeptics. On leav- 
ing college, he and his most intimate classmate, 



THE DOUBLE SKY 109 

also a scoffer, had decided to become playwriters 
and actors, and he has already joined a theatrical 
company in New York city. He is now on a jour- 
ney and stops for lodging at this wayside inn. 
He retires to his room. Through the thin parti- 
tion he hears the groans of a sick man in the room 
adjoining. The sounds of distress continue far 
into the night and then cease. Spite of his in- 
fidelity he lies there wondering if the sick man is 
prepared to die. In the morning he inquires of 
the landlord concerning the sufferer, and is told 
that he died at daybreak. He asks the dead 
man's name and is startled to hear the name of 
his own best-loved classmate. He goes up and 
looks at the familiar- face, white, cold, and silent. 
Standing there, the question, which sounds in his 
mind as if it dropped from the sky, is this : "Was 
he prepared to die?'' and then instantly the ques- 
tion swings on a pivot, strikes against his own 
soul, and is changed into, "Am I prepared to 
die?" He turns away, stunned as by a heavy 
blow, abandons, his journey, returns to his 
father's house, feels himself a lost and guilty 
sinner and dares not look up at the face of God. 
He goes to Andover, studies the Bible, and 
shortly accepts Christ as his Saviour and Lord. 
Five years subsequent to his godless graduation 
this young man, Adoniram Judson, is on his way 
to the mission field to give all his life to Burma. 
Thirty years later, having so given his life, he 
mounts up to God. 



110 THE OPEN FIRE 

Not long after the heavens had dropped their 
tremendous and awakening question into the soul 
of young Judson in that New England tavern, 
a like event took place on a vessel of the United 
States navy. The man-of-war Essex is lying off 
New Orleans. On board is a cabin boy thirteen 
years old. The youngster is trying hard to make 
himself a man after his ideal of manhood. He 
chews and smokes tobacco, swears like an old 
salt, tosses off a stiff glass of grog as if he had 
doubled Cape Horn, and is great at cards and 
gambling. The boy is named after the captain of 
the ship. One day, after dinner, his name-father, 
the captain, calls him into his cabin, locks the 
door and says, "David, what do you mean to be?'' 

"I mean to follow^ the sea," answers the boy. 

"Follow the sea?" says Captain Porter, 
sternly. "Yes, and be a poor, miserable, drunken 
sailor before the mast, kicked and cuffed all your 
days, and die alone and friendless in some fever 
hospital in a foreign land." 

"No, sir I I'll tread the quarter-deck and com- 
mand a ship as you do." 

"No, David, you w^on't. No boy ever reached 
the quarter-deck with such habits as yours. 
You'll have to change your whole life before you 
can possibly rise to a man's place." 

Then he sends the lad out. The captain has 
done his duty, and the sharp w^arning rattles like 
thunder across the sky of the boy's soul. Life 
suddenly looks solemn to him ; a sense of his free 



THE DOUBLE SKY 111 

agency, responsibility, and danger comes to him. 
"That's my fate, is it — to live like a dog and die 
friendless? It shall not be! I'll change my 
ways. I'll never drink or swear or gamble 
again"; and, looking up prayerfully, he calls on 
God in heaven to witness his vow. He w^as 
frightened at that sharp warning and became a 
Christian. Just for the sake of completing the 
story, let us take another look at that boy over 
forty years later. It is off New Orleans again. 
A United States squadron lies far down the river. 
It is two o'clock of an April morning when two 
red lights are hoisted to the masthead of the flag- 
ship, a signal to the fleet to weigh anchor and pro- 
ceed. The vessels move up the river in a double 
line. Presently they are abreast of the fort, and 
a perfect hell of fire and death blazes out on them 
from Fort Saint Philip on the right and Fort 
Jackson on the left. The battle rages furiously. 
The Varuna founders side by side with two Con- 
federate ships, which she has sunk. The Brook- 
lyn silences Fort Saint Philip. It is a terrific 
naval fight. Who is commanding there? It is 
Farragut — noblest of American naval comman- 
ders in his day. And Farragut is the cabin boy 
who sent his vow into the heavens from these 
same waters so long ago. The boy kept his vow ; 
and so he came to tread the quarter-deck, to 
command his country's fleets, and to be the great 
Christian admiral. 

Time would fail to speak of Augustine, and 



112 THE OPEN FIRE 

Luther, and Bunyan, whose souls were changed 
from center to circumference and whose lives 
were completely reversed by a Voice from above ; 
of Joan of Arc, who was mysteriously guided on 
an amazing career by the Voice, which told her 
what should be and what she ought to do; of 
Lady Henry Somerset, who, when in the depths 
of doubt even of God's existence, heard something- 
like a voice saying, "Act as if I were, and thou 
shalt know that I am," and, obeying it, left all 
her doubts behind and went forth on her beauti- 
ful life of devoted service for mankind at the 
head of the temperance women of England ; and 
of an innumerable host of others like them. 

The physical sky above us suggests by analogy 
several things concerning the spiritual heavens. 
The first is, the Universality of the Divine Knowl- 
edge. Omniscience covers the world as com- 
pletely as the sky does. The traveler in the Holy 
Land finds the convent of Mar Saba stuck like 
a hornet's nest high up against the steep wild 
cliffs of the Kidron. Inside the convent walls 
is the tomb of Saint Saba, covered by a cupola. 
When the visitor, standing under this cupola, has 
looked around at the paintings and silver lamps 
w^hich ornament the interior of the tomb, and 
suddenly lifts his look, he is startled at behold- 
ing overhead a great painted face face filling the 
dome and looking straight down on him with 
large eyes. In like manner the spiritual sky 
above us is a socket from which the Supreme In- 



THE DOUBLE SKY 113 

telligence turns on us its searching vision. None 
can escape that eye. We ought to realize that 
our existence is a spectacle to the heavens. In 
that there should be more inspiration to good and 
more restraint from evil than in all earthly 
things. The gladiator is sensible not so much 
of the dust of the small arena upon which he 
strives and contends as of the crowded amphi- 
theater which circles far around him with its up- 
ward slope of eyes, and makes him feel in every 
fiber of his sensitivity the pelting gaze of wit- 
nesses above him. We cannot hide from Omnis- 
cience any more than the earth can escape the 
embrace of the sky. 

Another thing which the world-covering firma- 
ment suggests is, the Universality of the Divine 
Government. It is a great way around the globe, 
and a rogue has plenty of room for flight, but, let 
him ride ever so fast or so far, he cannot ride 
from under the sky, can be? The great dramatist 
makes King Henry V say, "Now, if these men 
have defeated any law and outrun native human 
punishment, though they can outstrip men, they 
have no wings to fly from God.'' As the juris- 
diction of the lightning is over the whole heavens, 
so Divine sovereignty is omnipresent. No trans- 
gressor is strong enough to break loose and get 
free, for "God's laws are not like cobwebs which 
catch the little flies, but suffer the large ones to 
break through." Existence is one long interview 
with a moral Governor who not only watches us, 



114 THE OPEN FIRE 

but holds us to account. It is not possible for 
any of us to crawl out from under his tent. 
Whether we will or not, we are closeted with him 
for a face-to-face accounting which will last till 
doomsday and a long time after. He is putting 
solemn questions to us here under the canopy. 
The tent folds are tightly closed and he looks us 
in the eye w^hile we answer. We cannot get away, 
and there is no use in lying. If we evade or pre- 
varicate, the cross-examination conducted by Om- 
niscience will tangle us up and expose us, and w^e 
will have the reward of Ananias and Sapphira. 
We've got to discuss all things with God at close 
quarters. We must live and die in dialogue with 
him. It is not wise to make the discussion a con- 
troversy. Beyond question, the Supreme Con- 
troller has us fast. A thousand ways we are fast 
— fast in a net of many threads and cords. Emer- 
son, speaking of Reason, says : ^^It is not mine or 
thine, but we are its; we are its property and 
men." Yes, Reason has its grip on us. In like 
manner Dorner said once, ^'The truth is, gen- 
tlemen, not so much that man has conscience as 
that conscience has man.'' With Dorner, as with 
Kant, Martineau, Professor Knight, of Scotland, 
and a host of similar rank, we see in the action 
of conscience not autonomy, but theonomy, the 
dictates of the moral sense being, in effect, the 
very voice of God. Yes, Conscience has us. Rea- 
son has us. Logic has us. Mathematics has us, the 
Law of Sowing and Reaping has us, the Law of 



THE DOUBLE SKY 115 

Physical Growth and Decay has us, various In- 
tuitions have uSj Gravitation has us — many a law 
of many a kind binds us. We are under the 
meshes of a net, of which all these are only 
threads. Above all sits God. He it is who has 
flung over us this intricate and knotted network, 
and his hand holds it there. Under it we are 
captive and entangled. We cannot crawl out 
from under, nor break through. To escape is im- 
possible, for the Divine government shuts down 
over us tight and close as the sky does on the 
horizon^s rim. 

The universal firmament symbolizes another 
thing, namely, the Universality of Divine Provi- 
dence. So it is Love that hath us in its net. 
Alleluia! The overruling embrace of Omnipo- 
tence is firm upon us, but the tremendous arms of 
power reach down from a heart of infinite tender- 
ness. An old Scotch worthy says, "Even the 
sailing of a cloud hath Providence for its pilot.'' 
God's care is over all his works. Up yonder he 
gives its luster to an angel's wing; down here 
he feeds the frail bluebell with its drop of dew. 

Ibsen describes life as a prison cage, and says 
that "at him through the prison grating stares 
an Eye with terror in it; and its gaze sends 
shudders through him, at which he is sore af- 
frighted." But why be afraid of that great 
watching Eye? The Eye is there, but he that 
sitteth in the heavens is not looking for a chance 
to pounce on us. Through all the darkness and 



116 THE OPEN FIRE 

the storm of life a Divine Voice says, "Be of good 
cheer; it is I; be not afraid." Even Renan was 
wiser than Ibsen, for he said, "A fatherly smile 
shines across Nature and assures us that there is 
a kind Eye looking at us and a heart that follows 
us." Without this conviction, reverence and wor- 
ship were impossible, for we must hold with 
Browning that "A loving worm within its clod 
were diviner than a loveless God amid his 
worlds." 

Sometimes we hear a human voice saying bit- 
terly, "The individual is nothing; some general 
result is all God cares for ; individuals are sacri- 
ficed." That is the old Stoic maxim raising again 
in our late day its uninstructed head : "The gods 
attend to great things and neglect the small." 
We need not call upon Religion to answer that. 
The first thing to be said to this despondent view 
is not that it is unchristian, but that it is scien- 
tifically known to be incorrect and unwarranted. 
Science tells us that facts do not look that way. 
On the contrary, nothing is more amazing than 
the marvelous attention lavished on tiny things. 
It is reported that a man who spent his life try- 
ing to count the muscles of a caterpillar found a 
thousand. What an outfit for a worm ! Geology 
reports a special providence over tiny creatures ; 
while the big fellows, like the ichthyosaurus and 
the iguanodon, are all gone, extinct, the little fel- 
lows, races of tiny zoophytes, are preserved 
through untold ages and survive now exactly the 



THE DOUBLE SKY 117 

same as are found in the rocks of earliest geo- 
logic ages. 

God takes as good care of a field daisy as he 
takes of a world. The daisy is waited on by every 
force in the universe and all the mechanism of 
the heavens. It is a shareholder in the benefits of 
the cosmos. It is propped by the same power that 
maintains the stability of the great globe itself. 
Far regions send supplies to it. It is watered 
by rain which the sunbeams have dipped in 
golden buckets from the surface of far-off oceans 
and transported in water skins of fleecy cloud 
by the air line free of charge for its nourish- 
ment. Its nightly drink of dew is distilled from 
the same atmosphere which supports the life of 
kings and emperors, armies and nations, saints 
and sages. The daisy is held firmly in its place 
by the same force that braces together the stu- 
pendous structure of the material universe. This 
feeble flower of the field stands side by side with 
belted Saturn and many-mooned Jupiter to warm 
its tiny hands at the same great blazing open fire- 
place of the sun. It bathes its lovely face in the 
same bright daylight that sends the morning 
twenty-seven thousand millions of miles away 
to distant Neptune. Well does William Blake 
make the Lily of the Valley, breathing sweet 
odors in the soft green grass, say to Thel, a 
"daughter of the seraphim" : 

"I am a watery weed. 
And I am very small and dwell in lowly vales; 



118 THE OPEN FIRE 

So weak I scarce can hold the gilded butterfly perched 

on my head. 
Yet I am visited from heaven; and He that smiles on all 
Walks in the valley, and each morn spreads over me his 

hand, 
Saying, 'Rejoice, thou humble grass, thou new-born lily- 
flower. 
Thou gentle maid of silent valleys and of modest brooks, 
For I will see that thou be clothed with light and fed with 
morning manna.' " 



Truly has another said, ^The enormous system of 
nature is available, in mass and in particle, to the 
humblest needs of the smallest creature that 
crawls on earth.'' 

God cares for each ; he cares for all; but most 
of all for man. There is a convincing argument 
in the question, ^'Shall the great Housekeeper 
and Husbandman of this universe fodder his cat- 
tle, and water his flowers, and prune his plants, 
and not feed and care for his children?" "More 
servants wait on man than he'll take notice of." 
"O, mighty Love," says George Herbert, "man 
is one world and hath another to attend him." 
A converted Hindu said it pleased him to think 
of the broad expanse of blue immensity above 
him as the outspread hand of God — the stars be- 
ing to his fancy as jewels on the fingers of the 
Almighty — so that looking up and around to the 
diamonded sky he felt as if the clasp of his heav- 
enly Father's arms were about him on every side, 
and as if he could go nowhere that he was not 
encircled with the embracing love of which the 



THE DOUBLE SKY 119 

universal sky that blankets all the world is the 
only sufficient symbol. Seldom has human fancy 
pointed straighter at substantial fact. Carlyle 
shared the Hindu's faith, for he wrote : "Surely 
as the blue rim of heaven encircles us all, so 
does the Providence of the Lord of heaven. He 
will withhold no good thing from those that love 
him. This, as it was the ancient Psalmist's faith, 
so let it likewise be ours. This is the Alpha and 
Omega, I reckon, of all bliss than can belong to 
any man." Sam Jones put the same thing with 
his rude vigor in a single sentence: "God will 
take care of a good man if he has to put the 
angels on half rations for a year." A little sick 
boy, five years old, said, "I may not get well; 
maybe I'll die." He was told God would take 
care of him whether he lived or died. Then he 
asked, "Does God, who lives in the sky, know my 
name?" Being assured that God knew he was 
little Joe, he seemed soothed and satisfied. O, 
yes I He who telleth the number of the stars and 
calleth them all by name knows little Joe, and 
he who weaponed Orion with his glittering sword, 
and guides Arcturus with his sons, and wheels 
his throne upon the rolling worlds, can easily 
take care of little Joe. 

In this faith Beethoven found refuge for his 
soul in his hard and bitter closing years. Deaf, 
lonely, in bad health and prematurely old, tor- 
mented with many troubles and uncertain of to- 
paorrow's dinner, music was no longer a sufficient 



120 THE OPEN FIRE 

consolation. He needed something more to make 
life endurable, and found it in contemplating the 
Double Sky. He wrote that "the starry heavens 
above us and the moral law within us" assured 
him of a mighty All-Father, an infinite Pres- 
ence, transcending the range of Time and Death, 
from whom he came at the first and to whom he 
would return at the end, who cared for him and 
would protect him as he himself had protected 
others. This conviction made the pain of life less 
acute, rendered existence tolerable to him, en- 
grossed his thoughts, and at times enabled him 
to forget his troubles altogether. And Louis Ste- 
venson, in his last invalid years, crept in under 
the shelter of that same pacifying assurance, and 
wrote a friend, "If you are sure that God, in the 
long run, means kindness to you, you should be 
happy.'' That confidence kept Stevenson's heart 
in quietness and assurance to the end. 

Yet once more, the world-embracing sky sug- 
gests the Universality of the Provisions of Divine 
Grace. The star of Bethlehem shines over every 
human life. The best and the worst alike may 
sing: 

"God's sovereign grace to all extends. 
Immense and unconfined; 
From age to age it never ends; 
It reaches all mankind. 

"Throughout the world its breadth is known. 
Wide as infinity; 
So wide it never passed by one, 
Or it had passed by me." 



THE DOUBLE SKY 121 

It is wronging your own soul and giving the lie 
to God if you think for a moment that his mercy 
in Christ is not above all your sins. We are au- 
thorized to say to every human being: "As you 
were born in the center of the horizon's circle and 
always find yourself exactly under the middle of 
the dome, the whole sky seeming to center upon 
you, so the whole gospel, with its God, its Bible, 
its atonement, its Redeemer, and all his promises, 
centers upon you as if there were no one else to 
share them. As the physical universe turns upon 
each tiny flower its measureless regard, and as all 
matter and all space play off their potent 
forces on your bodily life, so Heaven plays off 
on you in focal fashion and with saving pur- 
pose its spiritual forces." No soul is utterly 
unvisited and untouched from above. There is 
a light which lighteth every man that cometh into 
the world; the candle of the Lord burns within 
the human spirit. There is a wind which 
bloweth where and when it listeth, and first or 
last every soul heareth the sound thereof as of a 
mighty rushing wind, or as the whisper of a still 
small voice. 

"Beneath the dome of this universe," wrote 
Martineau, "we cannot find a place where the 
musings of the eternal Mind do not murmur 
around us and where we may not overhear in 
our heart of hearts the eternal soliloquies of 
God." All souls may say to the all-visiting Di- 
vine Spirit: 



122 THE OPEN FIRE 

"Nor bounds, nor clime, nor creed thou know'st, 
Wide as man's need thy favors fall: 
The white wings of the Holy Ghost 
Stoop, seen or unseen, o'er the heads of all." 

And therefore, 

"I say to thee, do thou repeat 
To the first man thou mayest meet 
In lane, highway, or open street — 

"That he, and we, and all men, move 
Under a canopy of love, 
As broad as the blue sky above: 

"And if we will one Guide obey. 
The dreariest path, the darkest way, 
Shall issue out in heavenly day. 

"And we, on divers shores now cast. 
Shall meet, our perilous voyage past. 
All in our Father's house at last. 

"For we must count it true that Love, 
Blessing, not cursing, rules above. 
And that in it we live and move." 

Let us heed the words of Elihii, who calls to us 
from Job's far-off day, "Look unto the heavens 
and see." We will do well to regard the Double 
Sky, for out of the Upper Sky comes the only 
sufficient encouragement for worthy and noble 
labor. An enthusiast in art says, "The sky bends 
low where a true artist works." The fact is 
broader than that narrow statement, for the 
heavens bend low and near with sympathy and 
help wherever any earnest and honest soul is 
reverently doing its duty at life's appointed tasks. 
In all our labor under the sun let us look up to 



THE DOUBLE SKY 123 

"the Master of all good workmen'' for encour- 
agement and inspiration and strength. 

Out of the Upper Skj falls the only real and 
sufficient comfort for the weak and suffering. 
Sidney Lanier, wasting away with mortal sick- 
ness, wrote to his wife, "I thank God that in a 
knowledge of him I have a steadfast firmament 
of blue in which all clouds soon dissolve." 
Shakespeare knew that "There is a Pity sitting in 
the heavens that looks into the bottom of our 
grief," and that says, "Like as a father pitieth 
and as a mother comforteth, so will I." It may 
be that God sometimes takes us off our feet and 
lays us flat, that we may have along with greater 
need a better opportunity and stronger inclina- 
tion to look up. 

Out of the Upper Sky falls the only authentic 
and valid peace for the penitent. Therefore, let 
the troubled conscience, uneasy with the con- 
sciousness of sin, look up. Over the bowed head 
and contrite heart there is the sound of a jubilee 
in the dome of heaven where the angels are mak- 
ing a festival. A writer in an English Keview 
voices The Cry of the Earth-Children, sick of 
earth's passing pleasures and men's foolish 
praise, and of laborious days that only dig a 
deeper need : 

"We delve within the earth, we peer 

On earths beyond our own; 
Dizzied with earthliness we fear, 
Childlike, to be alone. 



124 THE OPEN FIRE 

"Ever half-conscious of a need 
Not met by star nor clod: 
Then falls the shadow of thy deed, 
Thy touch, O living God! 

"We are thy children: Life's pretense 
Fades from us as we weep 
These bitter tears of penitence, 
For pardon ere we sleep." 

Colonel S. H. Hadley, who had been for twenty 
years a drunkard, gambler, and criminal, went 
into Jerry McAuley's mission one night and 
knelt and wept and prayed till he rose from his 
knees a new creature. Hear him: "I went out 
upon the street and looked up at the sky. I 
don't believe I had looked up in ten years. A 
drunkard never looks up ; he always looks down. 
Now I looked up. It was a glorious starlit night, 
and it seemed to me I could see Jesus looking at 
me out of a million eyes." And looking unto 
Jesus, the author and finisher of his faith, he laid 
aside every weight and the sins that had so long 
beset him, and ran thenceforth a glorious race. 

Out of the Upper Sky shines the only steady 
light by which we may steer safely. A clear 
vision of bright and abiding spiritual realities is 
necessary to life's guidance. To steer by the stars 
is a necessity for the human voyage. The black 
Kroomen of the African shore jeer at the cap- 
tain of a foreign ship as a star-gazer. They say : 
"We steer by what we know ; we keep in sight of 
solid earth; we go from headland to headland; 



THE DOUBLE SKY 125 

we know where we are. But that fool white man 
steers away out of sight of land and imagines he 
can find out where he is and which way to go 
by looking at the stars through a glass. We are 
not foolish enough for that.'^ Truly is it said 
that "Christian faith possesses all the terrestrial 
lights and landmarks which can be claimed by 
the secularist, by the personal and the social con- 
science, and by the teaching of human experience. 
But, in addition, it is endowed with the stars of 
Kevealed Truth, and there are many days and 
nights when by these upper lights alone can a 
man discover where he is and how to steer.'' 
There come such times as Froude describes when 
"the compasses are all awry, the lights gone out 
or drifting, and nothing left to steer by but the 
stars.'' 1^0 soul ever made a safe voyage and 
came to the desirable haven without regarding 
the heavens and steering by the eternal stars that 
shme in the moral firmament. 

Out of the Upper Sky come the impulse and 
empowering essential to human progress. There- 
fore let nations and tribes look up. The glory of 
mankind is of heaven and not of earth. We were 
made in the beginning by almighty Hands which 
still reach down through darkness, molding men. 
Let development theories say what they will— 
and doubtless they say much that is correct— yet 
It still remains true that human civilization has 
not been bred out of the ground like a swarm of 
maggots out of a dung hill, nor even like a water 



126 THE OPEN FIRE 

lily out of black ooze, but has descended out of 
heaven from God like the New Jerusalem once 
seeen in vision. Old Plutarch's penetrating dis- 
cernment of the nature of things has not been 
improved upon, but only confirmed by subse- 
quent ages. It was his opinion that "a city might 
sooner be built without any ground to .fix it on 
than a commonwealth be constituted altogether 
void of religion, or being constituted, be pre- 
served." The apothegm which we quoted at the 
beginning we repeat now at the end. Lacordaire, 
speaking of the decline of nations, said: "The 
earth has devoured all those who have no longer 
regarded heaven save as the physical eye dis- 
covers it on the horizon." The epitaph of all 
the men and all the nations who have really 
perished is brief and explicit. In the dialect and 
idiom of this essay, it reads: They failed to re- 
gard the Double Sky. To ignore the spiritual is 
death ; to be spiritually minded is life, peace, and 
lasting prosperity. 

Lamartine, the Frenchman, statesman, poet, 
and historian, looking with envy upon nations 
whose great men were like Washington and 
Franklin, Sidney and Cromwell, uttered this 
lament for his own country, which seemed to him 
destitute of such leaders: "The great men of 
other countries live and die on the scene of his- 
tory, looking up to heaven; our great men appear 
to live and die, forgetting completely the only 
idea which is worth living and dying for — they 



THE DOUBLE SKY 127 

live and die looking at the spectator, or, at most, 
at posterity.'^ Only men who fear God and care 
for the verdict and approval of Heaven can pos- 
sibly lead nations of true greatness. Guizot, his- 
torian, statesman, and student of public affairs, 
when he fled from the unstability and unsafety 
of government in France to the shelter of stable 
England, said to Lord Shaftesbury, "Sir, it is 
their religion which has saved the English people 
from the ills which afflict France." A critic of 
Greek civilization notes that the main lines of 
Greek architecture are parallel with the ground, 
and the main channels of Greek thought followed 
the same course. The Greek temple merely deco- 
rates the earth. The Greek people lived only for 
that purpose and on that level. And because 
earth-decorating Hellas knew nothing higher 
than Olympus and Parnassus, and her gods were 
carnal, of the earth earthy, therefore the earth 
devoured her, and the glory that was Greece, like 
the splendor that was Rome, went drifting with 
its dead things down the dark of history. 

THUS SAITH THE POET 

"By Tigris, or the streams of Ind, 

Ere Colchis rose, or Babylon, 
Forgotten empires dreamed and sinned. 
Setting tall towns against the dawn, 

"Which, when the proud Sun smote upon, 

Flashed fire for fire and pride for pride; 
Their names were . . . ask oblivion! . . . 
'They had no vision, and they died.' 



128 THE OPEN FIRE 

"Queens, dusk of hair and tawny skinned, 

That loll where fellow leopards fawn, 
Their hearts are dust before the wind, 

Their loves, that shook the world, are wan . . . 

"Passion is mighty . . . but, anon, 

Strong Death has Romance for his bride; 
Their legends . . . ask oblivion! . . . 
'They had no vision, and they died.' 

"Heroes, the braggart trumps that dinned 
Their futile triumphs, monarch, pawn. 
Wild tribesmen, kingdoms disciplined, 
Passed like a whirlwind and were gone; 

"They built with bronze and gold and brawn, 
The inner Vision still denied; 
Their conquests . . . ask oblivion! . . . 
'They had no vision, and they died.' 

"Dumb oracles, and priests withdrawn, 

Was it but flesh they deified? 
Their gods were . . . ask oblivion! . . . 
'They had no vision, and they died.' " 

Josiah Royce, in his most notable book, speak- 
ing of the human reason as one of the sources 
of religious insight, says, "Man's reason can per- 
ceive a heaven which overarches us, a heaven 
which sends down influences that can transform 
us, that can enter into our loill and give us an 
impulse as tvell as a plan of life/^ The impact 
of the Power which moves upon the human spirit 
from above is felt by the ethical sense of every 
well-developed soul; and the more highly sensi- 
tized a man's nature is, the more he is aware of 
such impact, and the more distinctly he realizes 



THE DOUBLE SKY 129 

it to be as unmistakably personal in its origin as 
it is spiritualizing in its effect upon his own per- 
sonality. Such a soul is liable to have as vivid an 
experience as Russell Lowell had in one momen- 
tous hour which he thus described : ^^I had never 
before felt so clearly the Spirit of God in and 
around me. The whole room seemed to me full 
of God. The air seemed to quiver with the hover- 
ing presence of Something, I knew not what." 
To spell that Something with a capital is not un- 
reasonable. It is that Power which makes for 
righteousness and urges man onward and up- 
ward, giving both the impulse and the power. 
Look up, for above the dark night the stars are 
shining. When the French general said to the 
Vendean peasant, "We will tear down your 
chapels, we will burn your Bibles, we will kill 
your clergy, we will scatter your congregations, 
we will destroy everything that can make you 
think of your God," that unperturbed peasant 
answered with cool and serene irony, "You will 
leave us the stars, won't you?" And the French 
man of war decided, after reflection, that he 
w^ould mercifully leave them the stars. So he 
magnanimously restrained his almightiness from 
disturbing the sky; and so long as the stars 
shine overhead, men will think of God and 
down through endless generations men with 
uplifted faces will call to their downcast broth- 
ers, "Look unto the heavens and see." Richter 
said that so long as the word God endures 



130 THE OPEN FIRE 

in human language, it will direct the eyes of men 
upward; and whenever men look up, they can 
see the name of their God and Father blazoned in 
shining worlds across the boundless blue dome 
that overarches human life. 

One supreme Voice there is which calls us to 
look up and describes and interprets to us the 
contents of the spiritual heavens. It is that au- 
thoritative Voice which sounded from the Mount 
of Olives, and from the crest of Calvary, and now 
from the Heaven of heavens and in our heart of 
hearts. Except by heeding that Voice we know 
of no salvation. This Napoleon implied and con- 
fessed when he said, "The nearer I approach in 
my study of Christ, the more carefully I exam- 
ine everything that is above me.'' Ecce Ccelum! 
Behold the Double Sky. Above, in the Heaven of 
heavens, is the home of the soul, a building of 
God, a house not made with hands, in the realm 
of the eternal, up into which the ransomed spirit, 
freed from "this muddy vesture of decay," as- 
cends, singing : 

"Good-by, dear earthly sky! 
I leave thee as the gauzy dragon-fly 
Leaves the green pool to try 
His vast ambition in the vaster sky." 



MATTHEW ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 

Lest the purpose of this essay be misunder- 
stood, we distinctly disavow at the outset any 
disposition to disparage Matthew Arnold— a 
man of extraordinary inherited gifts, rare culti- 
vation, pure character and unsullied life; nor 
are we vain enough to imagine that it is within 
our power to lower the estimate which the intelli- 
gent world puts upon him. Our sole purpose, 
now and here, is to discuss the nature and value 
of a particular type of culture, and especially to 
consider the wisdom and effect of Arnold's apos- 
tolate to those both inside and outside of the 
churches whom he called Philistines. 

In view^ of his sharp attacks upon and sting- 
ing censures of the churches, it should not be re- 
garded as illegitimate, rude, or improper for 
any representative of the churches to criticize his 
crusade while defending those whom he attacked. 
To speak of Arnold as an apostle is not unwar- 
ranted. He regarded himself as an apostle — the 
Apostle to the Philistines. Mr. Frank Harris, 
one-time editor of the Fortnightly Review, called 
Arnold an apostle— "The latest Apostle to the 
Gentiles." 

Acolyte and thurifer before the high altar of 
Christianity, bearer of lights designed to shed a 
better illumination in the dim temple of our mod- 

131 



132 THE OPEN FIRE 

ern worship, and swinger of a jeweled censer in- 
tended to diffuse fragrance through its malodor- 
ous air — such Matthew Arnold, self-appointed 
apostle of sweetness and light, supposed himself 
to be, in what was on the whole the most preten- 
tious apostolate seen in intelligent circles in mod- 
ern times — an apostolate, not from the church, 
but to it, and applying the most candid and cut- 
ting criticism that Christian churches have ever 
received from a culture which owed itself to 
Christianity. 

It may be noted in passing that the favorite 
phrase of this imposing apostolate, the phrase 
"Sweetness and Light,'' was not original with Ar- 
nold, but was borrowed from Swift, who, in his 
Battle of the Books, commends the bees for their 
exemplary industry as producers of honey and 
wax, and then suggests in a moralizing way, 
that honey and wax-candles are fit emblems of 
"the two loveliest of things, sweetness and light." 
Spiritualizing the words, "sweetness and light," 
to signify beauty and intelligence, Arnold made 
them the text and motto of his ostentatious em- 
bassy to the churches and by incessant repetition 
gave wider vogue, along with higher meaning, to 
Swift's redolent and refulgent phrase. In par- 
ticular he proclaimed that beauty and intelli- 
gence are the two elements most lacking and most 
needed in our current religion. Especially in 
one famous essay he expounded his new and bet- 
ter gospel of sweetness and light, Arnold's "Heav- 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 133 

enly Twins." That essay is in reality a study of 
ideals of human perfection and a setting forth 
of what this apostle of culture considers the true 
ideal. The current Christian conception of Per- 
fection he criticizes as faulty and segmental. The 
perfection aimed at by the religious bodies he 
regards as meager and unattractive, consisting, 
he says, merely in conquering the faults of our 
animality and producing a human nature perfect 
only on the moral side. The true ideal, and only 
worthy goal of aspiration and endeavor, is, he in- 
sists, "a human nature perfect on all its sides," 
a manhood teres atque rotundus, a perfection 
many-sided, polished, and complete. For the 
source and sanction of this fine ideal he goes, not 
to the New Testament, but to the ancient pagan 
Greeks, with whose spiritual preeminence he 
seems profoundly impressed. He attributes what 
he calls^^ the immense spiritual superiority of the 
Greeks" to their being "inspired with a central 
and happy idea of Perfection" ; and tells us that 
the finely tempered and harmonious perfection 
which the Greeks conceived of was produced by 
"subordinating all else to the formation of spirit 
and character." And surely, beyond dispute, 
that is the way to produce it. But do we need 
Arnold or the old Greeks to tell us that? Does 
not the most accessible of books, a little volume 
called the New Testament, a volume as modern 
as it is ancient, and more widely circulated in 
one year than Arnold^s writings can be in a thou- 



134 THE OPEN FIRE 

sand years, teach exactly that? Is not that its 
plan for producing a finely tempered and har- 
monious perfection, namely, by the spiritualiza- 
tion and refinement of man's nature through con- 
quering the faults of his animality and subordi- 
nating everything to the formation of spirit and 
character? And does not Christianity furnish 
what Grecian culture never had, and what Mat- 
thew Arnold's personality is far from presenting, 
a perfect Pattern, Christ Jesus, not to mention 
the addition of a divine enabling by the imparta- 
tion from above of a spirit of power and love and 
sanity? Arnold really brings us no news what- 
ever, increases our spiritual knowledge not one 
whit, adds nothing to the New Testament, but, on 
the contrary, as will be noted later, takes some- 
thing away. When this messenger, arriving from 
ancient Greece by way of Rugby and Oxford, la- 
bors to impress upon Christian people the tran- 
scendent beauty of "a human life aspiring with 
all its organs after sweetness, light, and perfec- 
tion," the Christian people wonderingly reply 
that they learned that long ago from a Teacher 
greater than Arnold — greater than all Greek 
sages — from the one supreme authority and ex- 
emplar, the one only perfect character, living the 
one only perfect life, who either by his own lips 
or the mouth of his messengers says in substance 
to his disciples, "Be ye perfect, not merely in re- 
straining your carnal nature, but in adding vir- 
tue to virtue, grace to grace, in all things lovely 



AKNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 135 

and true and pure and of good report, till you at- 
tain the finished stature of perfect manhood, 
teres atque rotundus, and are presented faultless 
at last before the throne of His glory." 

This self-appointed censor of the religious 
bodies, this disparager of their ideals, feels 
obliged to concede that the Christian churches 
have accomplished much good and produced 
much happiness, and that theirs was the most 
considerable movement toward Perfection extant 
until he launched his cult of culture; yet so im- 
perfect do the churches seem to him that he mar- 
vels how cultivated persons can adhere to them 
and how vast multitudes of sane people can con- 
tinue to believe in such faulty organizations, and 
can stand ready to support them, not only 
with money, but with their very life-blood, 
as he plainly sees to be the fact. His opin- 
ion of the ideals held and the fruits pro- 
duced in character and life by the religious 
bodies requires strong language to express. 
He charges the members of those bodies with 
"hideousness and rawness." He wants to teach 
these raw persons to like what is really beauti- 
ful, graceful, and becoming; wants these "raw 
and unkindled masses to be touched with sweet- 
ness and light" ; wants to take the vulgarity out 
of the religion of the churches so as to make it a 
really refined, respectable, genteel sort of faith 
such as cultivated and elegant persons like him- 
self can consent to entertain. 



136 THE OPEN FIRE 

Now, doubtless, it must be admitted that some 
of the interpreters of Christianity have set forth 
an unworthy and unpleasing conception of hu- 
man perfection. And it is not inconceivable that 
a man with Arnold's gifts might be appointed by 
God to bring some needed reproof and rectifica- 
tion, and if he should really enlarge and elevate 
our ideals, then the human race, and most of all 
the religious organizations, avowedly bent on per- 
fection, ought to be concerned to know and 
acknowledge the fact and confess indebtedness to 
him. In many things he and the most of us are 
entirely agreed. That the world requires and our 
religion should furnish, through its disciples, 
more sweetness and light, more intelligence and 
love, will hardly be denied. That the seeming 
lack of these was a poignant distress to him be- 
tokens in him a nature not destitute of spiritual 
sensitiveness, and that he lifted up his voice like 
a prophet calling attention to the pressing want 
makes him, in that respect and to that extent, a 
useful servant of mankind. The inexpressible de- 
sirability of the end he has in view is beyond dis- 
pute ; and if he or any other man or body of men 
could drench and suffuse our religious organiza- 
tions with larger light and love, an overjoyed and 
grateful Christendom would not withhold its 
praise. 

But Arnold did not do justice to the ideals and 
fruits of the evangelical churches. He failed to 
perceive the surpassing value of a moral culture 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 137 

powerful enough to subdue man's rampant ani- 
malism and to set the spiritual man triumphant 
over the flesh, the world, and the devil — a culture 
capable of taking the ape and tiger out, refining 
away the grossness and fierceness of untamed 
human nature, and producing sober, conscien- 
tious, gentle, humane, and godly lives. A con- 
quered animality and a nature morally perfected 
are results not to be belittled ; and the institution 
and method which can instrumentally achieve 
such results in millions of lives have some claim 
to be considered divine. We may express, in 
passing, our surprise at finding so stringent a 
stickler for refinement and for living in the spirit 
as Arnold was, attaching so little importance to 
conquering the faults of our animality as to say 
one day that he thought the coarseness and sensu- 
ality of Voltaire's w^ritings a matter of small im- 
portance. And we do not wonder that his friend 
Clough turned on Arnold properly enough, in a 
manner rather rough, with the reproving rebuff, 
"Well, you don't think any better of yourself for 
that, I suppose" ; which was a polite way of say- 
ing, "You ought to be ashamed of yourself." 
Certainly moral perfection which the churches 
aim at primarily, but not exclusively, is more im- 
portant than aesthetic refinement which dom- 
inates Hellenic culture. When Newman Hall 
went to John Ruskin for advice as to how to 
build a beautiful house of worship for his congre- 
gation the great teacher of architectural art, but 



138 THE OPEN FIRE 

greater teacher of high morals, answered some- 
what quizzically and evasively but very pun- 
gently, that the true way to make a really beau- 
tiful church is not by piling stones one upon an- 
other, but by "gathering together a few people 
who will not steal nor tell lies." 

Moral perfection, and not aesthetic effect, was 
foremost in Ruskin's esteem, and the perfecting 
of human nature on the moral side was, it ap- 
pears, even in the opinion of the author of Mod- 
ern Painters and the Stones of Venice ^ the su- 
premely urgent thing, the crowning glory as it is 
the prime function of the Christian Church. Most 
assuredly, any cult of Perfection which fails 
morally fails entirely. And while the evangelical 
churches have abundantly proved the power of 
their fervent faith to promote moral perfection, 
and are proving it this very hour, near and afar, 
Hellenism, which Arnold exalts above Christian- 
ity, is fatally discredited by its failure to brace 
the moral fiber. The ethical looseness of the Hel- 
lenic culture revived by Arnold seems to be 
shrewdly referred to under a veiled allusion in the 
irony of Zangwill's suggestion that Jezebel may 
very likely have wanted to put more sweetness 
and light into the narrow^ incompleteness of 
Elijah's and Elisha's view of life; those men of 
God being, to her more liberal taste, too rigidly 
and exclusively bent on purity, sobriety, right- 
eousness, and godliness. 

Christianity, at its beginning, met and routed 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 139 

Hellenism. Christianity's spokesman at the seat 
and center of Hellenism was Paul on Mars' Hill. 
In our modern day Matthew Arnold led Hellen- 
ism to the attack again, with the same result. 
The Hellenic type of culture and religion fails: 
the Pauline conquers. In one of J. P. Mowbray's 
animated dialogues that vivacious, keen-witted 
woman Irene points out with graphic idiom how, 
as she sees it, the boasted superiority of Hellenic 
ideals went down under the blows of the tent- 
maker of Tarsus. She says substantially : 

When Paul made his speech on Mars' Hill to 
the Athenians he was at close quarters with Hel- 
lenism, and he treated it as if he were a demo- 
crat and not an aesthete, bowling down all the 
things that Hellenic culture doted on. And he 
cleaned the deck, he swept the field ; every one of 
his blows landed squarely between the Hellenic 
eyes. 

The Athenians had a number of sensitive spots, 
and he hit them straight. 

1. They were autochthons, born on the sacred 
soil of Greece, and immensely puffed up about 
it. And Paul said to them, "God made the whole 
world — it is all sacred — and all things therein." 

2. They glorified architecture, and were espe- 
cially vain of their temples. Paul said, "The 
Lord of heaven and earth dwelleth not in tem- 
ples made with hands." 

3. They devoted their genius to sculpture, 
especially admiring and adoring their statues of 



140 THE OPEN FIRE 

gods and goddesses. Paul said, "The Godhead 
is not like unto gold or silver or marble graven 
by art and man's device." 

4. They called all the rest of the world barbar- 
ians, and thought them unfit to be on the planet. 
Paul said, "God hath made of one blood all na- 
tions of men to dwell on the face of the earth." 

5. They prided themselves on being such broad 
religionists as to include in their vague and im- 
partial worship all possible divinities. Paul said, 
in substance: "Your worship is ignorant. God 
has long borne with it out of pity for the blind- 
ness of your minds. But now that the darkness 
is past and the true light shineth, he calls you 
to repent of your idolatries and to be instructed 
by the man Christ Jesus whom he hath raised 
from the dead, and in whose gracious face you 
may behold the light of the knowledge of the 
glory of the true and living God." Irene says 
that while she was reading Paul's sentences she 
kept saying "Biff," "Biff," at the end of each one, 
as his straight hard blows struck home, and the 
dainty fond ideals of Hellenic culture fell down 
into the dust. 

One cardinal mistake of Matthew Arnold, the 
would-be reformer of our holy religion, was in 
thinking that the faith of our fathers and of his 
father could be improved by eliminating the an- 
thropomorphic and miraculous out of Christian 
history and interpretation. Under this delusion 
he liberally blue-penciled the Bible, and then pre- 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 141 

sented us Avith what he called "the scheme of 
Christianity cleared of objections"; and he 
cleared it of "objections" in such a way as to pro- 
voke from Mr. Gladstone the remark, in Studies 
Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler, that 
Arnold "combined a professed concern for the 
Christian religion with a not less boldly avowed 
determination to transform it beyond possibility 
of recognition by friend or foe." He ran his 
shears through Christian Scripture, "cutting out 
as anthorpomorphic and legendary," says Glad- 
stone, "nearly all which its readers believe to be 
the heart and center of its vital force." That 
what he wished to extirpate is of the very essence 
of Christianity as a system of truth derived from 
a divine Source and possessing supernatural 
sanctions, is plain even to a rationalistic natur- 
alist like John Burroughs, who sees clearly that 
the part which Arnold tries to get rid of is the 
very element which makes Christianity a power 
for good over mankind, the part which is most 
true and dear to men's hearts, which takes the 
deepest hold upon their spirits, and is most 
potent in inspiring effort and controlling con- 
duct ; that what Arnold wanted to do for religion 
was equivalent to stripping the tree of its leaves 
and leaving it to perish as surely as if he had cut 
it down ; that his attempted service to the Chris- 
tian public was like burning their temple and 
offering them the ashes; and that Arnold's sub- 
limated extract of Christianity is no more Chris- 



142 THE OPEN FIRE 

tianity than a vial of attar of roses is the city of 
Damascus, set amid its glorious gardens, radiant 
with color, musical with tinkling fountains, 
bright with the gleam of swift rivers, verdur- 
ous with living beauty and teeming with popu- 
lation on the desert's edge. 

When a man transfers theism from a person 
to a power, substituting in place of a Personal 
Deity a stream of tendency, how much of Chris- 
tianity can he retain? Arnold failed to make 
himself a welcome apostle to the religious bodies 
to whom he offered his impoverishing services. 
His reforms and methods were unacceptable and 
even offensive. The churches, which he wished 
to sweeten and enlighten, felt that the effect of 
his effort to transform Christianity w^as not to 
transfigure it into greater glory, but, rather, to 
diminish, devitalize, and darken it — to take the 
sunshine out of its atmosphere and produce such 
a climate as might make a Christian Hamlet say, 
"The air bites shrewdly, it is very cold,'' and a 
Christian Horatio shiveringly assent, "It is a 
nipping and an eager air." More than this, his 
irreverent handling of hallowed beliefs was 
shocking to the reverent and devout, and his dis- 
dainful bearing toward pious souls left in them a 
sore sense of personal injury. George Jackson 
truly says: "Few men of our day have given so 
much needless pain to so many Christian people, 
or have uttered so many wild and whirling words 
with such a demure recklessness, as Matthew Ar- 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 143 

nold.'' His attitude toward the religious bodies 
and their cherished faith made him seem to the 
churchgoing good man on the street more like a 
gargoyle scowling under the cathedral eaves than 
like a rapt saint standing on the pinnacle with 
upturned face and lifted finger pointing men to 
heaven. Arnold made Christian people feel as 
did Catherine of Russia when she said of Riviere, 
the French physiocrat: "He supposed we Rus- 
sians walked on all fours, and very politely he 
took the trouble to come from La Martinique to 
teach us how to stand on our hind legs.'' 

Yet his proposed innovations were rather ir- 
ritating because of their spirit and manner, than 
alarming because of their dangerousness, for 
Goldwin Smith truly says, that though this 
"jaunty gentleman did something in his light 
airy way with his silver shafts to forward theo- 
logical disintegration," yet he was "rather a con- 
noisseur and a dilettant than a serious philoso- 
pher or theologian," and from the standpoint of 
thorough scholarship his criticism of accepted 
Christian conceptions and traditions was too 
amateurish to be taken seriously. He is by no 
means an authority in religion, philosophy, or 
biblical criticism, but, rather, a literary critic, 
a writer of close grain and hard finish, an artist 
in crystalline and finely beveled sentences, a poet, 
and a master of pellucid and polished prose; a 
doctor of letters, but only a dabbler in divinity. 
True, he thought himself an expert with excep- 



144 THE OPEN FIRE 

tional qualifications, natural and acquired, for 
revising and improving current Christianity ; but 
intelligent Christendom, having had plenty of 
time to think it over, does not so regard him ; and 
after all his labor — after his copious outpouring 
of alleged saccharine luminosity — Christian 
churches decline to accept the new gospel accord- 
ing to Matthew, son of Thomas Arnold — the 
gospel desupernaturalized, eviscerated, and de- 
vitalized — as a substitute for the old Gospel, ac- 
cording to Matthew, the evangelist, the glorious 
Gospel of the blessed God, with the splendor of 
its supernaturalism undimmed. 

Arnold's revised and improved Christianity 
seemed to the religious bodies, to w^hom he offered 
it, to be a mutilated and minimized Christianity ; 
just as ex-President Eliot's proposed religion of 
the future is not a new religion, but is, as has 
been said, "a denial of the faith and a rejection 
of the principles which have been the foundation 
of Christianity and civilization for twenty cen- 
turies." The most reverend and solemn sancti- 
ties of the Christian faith Arnold treats at times 
with airy irreverence. In the very Holy of holies 
he stands unawed, with head unbow^ed and knee 
unbended. The Holy Trinity — Father, Son, and 
Holy Spirit — he travesties as "The three Lord 
Shaftesburys." His mood and attitude at times 
toward Jesus the Saviour justified J. P. Mow- 
bray in saying that "one of Arnold's defects was 
a dilettante spirit of irreverence,'' and that he, 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 145 

like Renan, carried this spirit into the most au- 
gust themes: that they both captured and 
brought back to their respective studios the his- 
toric Jesus and there posed him in aesthetic radi- 
ance : that Renan, having posed him in a warm, 
sensuous light, calls him "The charming teacher," 
and says that Jesus, in the midst of his atoning 
agony, "is thinking of the charming girls of 
Galilee" ; and that Arnold posed Jesus in an Ox- 
ford peplum and exclaimed, "Behold sweet rea- 
sonableness with a secret. At last we have an 
intuition without an imperative. How debon- 
air I" Frank Harris, editor of the Fortnightly 
Review, reports Arnold as saying to him: 
"Renan was always my teacher, my teacher in 
the view he took of Saint Paul and the Bible 
generally" ; and the editor adds, "To the end he 
remained a sort of lesser Renan, Renan at sec- 
ond-hand, a puritanic Renan." 

We are told by some that Arnold was not so 
much an apostle to the churches as a missionary 
to outsiders and unbelievers ; that his purpose in 
"clearing Christianity of objections" by a ra- 
tionalized and moderated version thereof was 
to make it acceptable to the fastidious 
children of a dainty culture and the deniers 
of the supernatural. It seems that one of his 
aims in disrobing and redressing Christianity 
was to make it more presentable in polite so- 
ciety. He belonged, says one, to a group of Eng- 
lishmen who toddled after Renan and picked up 



146 THE OPEN FIRE 

his doubts ; but, being too well bred to be brutal 
in his skepticism, and conceiving himself to have 
an irenic mission, Arnold used finesse and dip- 
lomatically played the impartial host, both to 
Belief and to Denial, saying on the one hand to 
Christianity, "If you will only drop your dis- 
tinctive characteristics and adapt yourself to the 
company'^ — saying on the other hand to Nega- 
tion, "If you will only borrow some of the things 
which Christianity, in deference to my wise sug- 
gestion, has dropped" — and then saying to both, 
"I don't see now why both of you cannot here- 
after get along amicably and respectably in good 
society." The most objectionable feature of this 
maladroit intermediation, this fatuous and sinis- 
ter diplomacy, is the process of reduction it ap- 
plies to Christianity, reducing it so far as to ren- 
der it powerless and worthless for the w^ork it 
undertakes, while not reducing it far enough to 
command the favor and acceptance of the unbe- 
lievers. Thus both his advisory apostolate to 
the churches and his propitiatory mission to the 
skeptics proved equally futile. The fact is his 
was a literary and not a religious mission, as he 
himself unwittingly confessed when he told the 
Authors' Club in New York that only the literary 
class had understood and sustained him ; to that 
class alone had he any really very important 
message. Though even in literature he was by 
no means infallible — as witness his judgment 
that "Enoch Arden" is probably Tennyson's best. 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 147 

If fuller explanation of Arnold's failure is de- 
sired, I know not how it may be better obtained 
than by a direct study of the man himself, since 
he was not only the apostle and advocate, but 
also the embodiment and manifesto of his own 
type of culture. Arnold having said that Swift, 
who invented the phrase, "sweetness and light," 
was himself deficient in sweetness, there can be 
no impropriety in raising the question here 
whether the elements were so mixed in Arnold as 
to give the world assurance of exceptional sweet- 
ness. And we cannot proceed far with such an 
inquiry before we begin to feel that this apostle 
is not preeminently fitted for his mission. 

To begin with, a deep, broad, generous love for 
men, as men, is wanting. Mere human nature 
was not dear to him and so he did not crave asso- 
ciation with it. He never played the comrade 
with mankind; never brothered with the human 
race on a level; never marched in the ranks, 
touching elbows, but chose to sit up on the re- 
viewing stand, representing inspectorship and 
authority. A eupatrid, eminently high-born, he 
kept himself aloft and aloof from the mass of 
men, standing always for the social and intellec- 
tual aristocracy, and wearing a patrician air. 
The circle of his acquaintance was inten- 
tionally narrow, and his friendships eclec- 
tically homogeneous. In his preferences and 
intercourse he belonged to that archaic provin- 
cial world where the fences are up. His preju- 



148 THE OPEN FIRE 

dices bristled like a cheval-de-frise between him 
and large classes of civilized and honorable men ; 
and the tolerant largeness of a genuinely cosmo- 
politan spirit was all beyond him. Brunetiere 
is by no means a fanatical moralist, yet such 
aloofness and alienation as Arnold manifested 
Brunetiere characterizes as "immoral." He 
pronounces art immoral to the extent of its 
isolating tendency; and observes that the effect 
of the over-refinement of the artist's aesthetic 
sensibilities is often to estrange him from his fel- 
low men whom he habitually speaks of as "the 
crowd," "the herd." Even this French critic's 
moral sense feels such unbrotherliness to be anti- 
social, inhuman, immoral ; and counts it a thing 
to be reprobated by civilized humanity when a 
man speaks harshly and contemptuously of a 
large body of his fellow citizens who are mostly 
conscientious and upright, kindly and benevo- 
lent, quite as respectable in every relation of life 
as he himself can be. This isolating tendency in 
Matthew Arnold's type of culture gives a taint of 
the inhuman and, Brunetiere says, *^of the im- 
moral." Its evil spirit of disdain is like that 
which made Flaubert say in his correspondence 
with George Sand that the common people are 
always hateful. It reminds us of a certain Ro- 
man in the time of Nero, who is said to have had 
a two-fold contempt for the crowd — first, as an 
aesthetic person ; second, as an aristocrat. 

Matthew Arnold's culture did not save him 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 149 

from giving now and then an impression of in- 
tellectual priidisliness, dyspeptic daintiness, and 
if not effeminacy, at least a want of robustness. 
We cannot help wondering why a stalwart and 
bearded man, six feet high, should go about in 
the human crowd and crush, holding a handker- 
chief and a vinaigrette to his nostrils. We hon- 
estly think Arnold made an excessive display of 
his disgusts. Much of the time his nose was in 
the air and his facial expression like that worn 
by a stranger railroading across the Hackensack 
salt meadows when the train is opposite the fer- 
tilizer factory, and the traveler, ignorant of the 
nature and location of the cause, eyes his nearest 
fellow passengers, one by one, accusingly. He 
played to excess the part of a ^^Martyr of Dis- 
gust.'' Moreover, the frequent and unrestrained 
expression of his squeamish displeasure and dis- 
likes seems to us to indicate a want of true re- 
finement as well as lack of self-control. A bright 
woman is quoted as saying, "Mat Arnold was 
not a masculine writer. He was too sweet for 
anything. He wanted even the Scriptures can- 
died. He could not quote the Sermon on the 
Mount without adding syrup to it." 

We all remember that this fastidious gentle- 
man's worst hete noir was vulgarity. George 
Eliot once wrote : "If there is one attitude more 
odious to me than any other of the many attitudes 
of ^knowingness,' it is the air which it sometimes 
assumes of superiority to the vulgar." Now, this 



150 THE OPEN FIRE 

air and attitude were more fully developed and 
sustained in Matthew Arnold than in any other 
man of modern times. The abominable preva- 
lence of vulgarity affected him like the presence 
of a loathsome and contagious disease. "Amer- 
icans," he says, "have it horribly." Matthew Ar- 
nold says that he was sitting in his study one 
morning when the butler showed in an American 
lady and a small boy. The lady said : "Glad to 
make your acquaintance, Mr. Arnold. I have 
often heard of you. No, don't trouble to speak, 
sir I I know how valuable your time is I" Then, 
turning to the boy, she said, "This is him, Lenny, 
the leading critic and poet. Somewhat fleshier 
than we had been led to expect !" But there is a 
query wandering up and down this Western land 
whether the lofty gentleman, who twice deigned 
to visit us, largely for lucre's sake, was so far 
exalted as he imagined above the average Amer- 
ican or Briton. It is whispered in some places 
that his speech and manners were not always 
gentle, but sometimes quite rude. It is affirmed 
that, at a select dinner given in his honor in a 
private house in one of our chief centers of cul- 
ture, he was surly and petulant, finding fault 
even with the food set before him by his host. 
Certain it is that he impressed some refined and 
educated persons as being deficient in delicacy 
and good breeding. For particulars, inquire of 
the families of the Andover professors and a 
prominent publisher in Boston. In manners as 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 151 

in literature he fell short at times of that "good 
taste," which, in Lowell's admirable words, "is 
the conscience of the mind, as conscience is the 
good taste of the soul" ; good taste being the sense 
of what is fit and therefore ought to be, and con- 
science being the sense of what ought to be and 
is therefore fit. Arnold's culture failed to give 
him the Christlike faculty of being sympathet- 
ically one with those whom he tried to correct 
and instruct. When Stuart Mill said he thought 
Bentham "almost entirely wanting in sympathy 
and imagination so that a very large proportion 
of the springs of human action were. unknown or 
incomprehensible to him," a candid fellow Briton 
remarked that Mill himself closely resembled his 
master Bentham in lacking the imagination and 
sympathy which would enable him to understand 
human nature. And Arnold must be classed with 
Mill and Bentham in this respect, for he also 
was deficient in the sympathy which compre- 
hends. All of them had little of the faculty em- 
phasized in Charles Readers great book Put Your- 
self in His Place, a faculty which is necessary to 
practical intelligence and leadership — as was 
illustrated in the fact that Cardinal Vaughan's 
lack of Cardinal Manning's intuitive sympathy 
with all sorts and conditions of men made it im- 
possible for Vaughan to become anything more 
than the nominal primate of Romanism in Great 
Britain. It may be set down as an axiom that 
in the human and spiritual realm he who does 



152 THE OPEN FIRE 

not love cannot comprehend. Matthew Arnold, 
while thoroughly at home with the principalities 
and powers of literature, was not intimately ac- 
quainted with flesh and blood. That inseeing fac- 
ulty, the imagination, was retained mostly in the 
service of his intellect and was but little at the 
disposal of his heart. Many and great have been 
the mistakes of a cold and self-sufficient intelli- 
gence, taking no account of that great sentimen- 
tal human deep, whose mysterious currents of 
feeling set irresistibly along the coasts of life, 
and in which ineradicable instinctive convictions 
are in solution as salt is in the sea. Always the 
cold man is a deficient man, disqualified to ap- 
praise aright anything in human nature or hu- 
man nature's universe. The heart when it is 
pure makes fewer mistakes than the mind. It 
is an error to suppose that coldness and dryness, 
in the observer or in the atmosphere, insure cor- 
rect vision, much less complete vision. The cold, 
dry air of purely intellectual regions is not free 
from refractions and reflections, distortions and 
phantasmic illusions; even on the icy Brocken 
there is a specter ; even in the dry desert men see 
mirages. It is in the calm and the cool that sci- 
ence affects to pursue its search; but even the 
astronomer, aloft in the night-air on his tower, 
reckoning and registering the stars, is liable to 
see what is called "a ghost," and to report, as 
Struve did in the case of Procyon's alleged com- 
panion-star, a world which is not there. His 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 153 

position is high and dry enough, the air is cold 
and quiet enough, his temper is sober and sci- 
entific enough ; but he is deceived, and what he 
reports as a star is a mere appearance, due to 
an interior flaw in the lens, or a reflection on the 
surface of the glass, or a drop of dew like a tear in 
the telescope^s eye. It is on a cold temper and 
a dry unemotional atmosphere that skepticism 
for the most part frames its doubts and denials, 
yet it misses the facts often, and wanders away 
after delusions. The stoniest and frostiest skep- 
tic regarding orthodox religion whom I ever 
knew fell an easy prey to the spiritualists, turned 
his home into a bedlam with midnight seances, 
spirit-rappings and table-tippings, till his wife 
and two of his children went raving crazy with 
horror of the pseudo-supernatural, victims of the 
crass ignorance and raw credulity of unbelief. 

But most of all, it is in judging of and dealing 
with human nature and life that the cool, unsym- 
pathetic critic, looking through the dry air of 
pride or indifference, is sure to miss the mark and 
be self-deceived. The windows through which 
such a man looks out on life are so frosted by the 
temperature within that he cannot see clearly. 
A man of acute and ambitious mind, linked with 
an ungenerous soul, will come to mean conclu- 
sions and deal unfairly with his kind. Matthew 
Arnold's inability to comprehend men impairs 
the value of many of his opinions. Unable to 
judge justly, his verdicts were often unduly 



154 THE OPEN FIRE 

harsh. While there is no warrant for going the 
length of the French saying, "To know all is to 
pardon all," yet assuredly, in order to equitable 
judgment, one must have not only knowledge of 
the facts, but ability to comprehend the nature of 
the case and the actors therein; and in order to 
do justly it is necessary to love mercy as well as 
to walk humbly before God. Misjudging his fel- 
low men, underestimating their qualities and 
capabilities, Arnold distrusted their competency, 
their judgment, their motives, lacking faith in 
what Tennyson finely calls "the common-sense of 
most." 

From the facts above noted it follows inev- 
itably that Arnold's influence was small and his 
endeavors mostly ineffectual with the classes he 
took to task and scolded and tried to educate — 
the puritans, dissenters, evangelicals, middle- 
classes, and so on through the whole range of his 
well-nigh catholic antipathies. Intellectual su- 
periority without sympathy is powerless to uplift 
the thoughts, broaden the views, or awaken con- 
victions in the minds of men. In the nature of 
things, a critic whose appreciations are luke- 
w^arm and his indignations scorching hot, who 
writes upon the epidermis of his respectable 
neighbors with a pencil of lunar caustic, and 
whose irony might almost peel the skin from 
an Egyptian mummy, will not be an influen- 
tial teacher, nor a persuasive leader, nor a suc- 
cessful reformer, however eloquently he may 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 155 

lecture on the supreme importance of persuasive- 
ness and charm. And a culture inspired by fas- 
tidiousness of taste, made up of delicate pre- 
dilections and sniffing prejudices, ruled by 
aristocratic affinities, which cut a man off from 
his brethren and alienate him from the human 
mass; a culture which stands aloof from com- 
mon life and extends its favors at the end of a 
pole; a culture which manifests, as Emily Dickin- 
son phrases it, "a refined horror of freckled hu- 
man nature" ; a culture which offensively obtrudes 
its own superiority, and uses a tone of impatience 
which means, ^^You stupid creatures, you ought 
to be cultivated, but you're not, and I almost 
despair of making you so; O cursed spite that 
ever I was born to set you right!" — the faintest 
suspicion of such an attitude and spirit is enough 
to make any culture obnoxious and offensive to 
those whom its intrusions vex and its supercili- 
ous airs exasperate. And the culture which 
Arnold preached as an improvement on current 
Christianity had enough of this tone and temper 
to make the futility and failure of his apostleship 
stand as a warning to dainty and aristocratic 
preachers and teachers for all time to come. 

As to the personal temper and disposition of 
our apostle of sweetness, Mr. Gladstone observed 
in him, instead of exceptional charm and per- 
suasiveness, a querulous disposition, "a spirit of 
objection," "an ungovernable bias toward find- 
ing fault." And the same trait was in Louis Ste- 



156 THE OPEN FIRE 

venson's mind when, at his Samoan refuge in 
the soft air of the South Pacific, his own fragile 
life hanging by a slender and fast-fraying thread, 
Stevenson received the news that Matthew Ar- 
nold had suddenly gone to meet his Maker, and 
then, w^ith reverent seriousness, said, slowly and 
gently, "I'm sorry for Arnold; he won't like 
God" — shrewdest and most trenchant comment 
ever made on our modern Professor of the Gentle 
Art of Finding Fault. Even the most amiable of 
Arnold's- contemporaries were annoyed by his 
censorious magisterial manner as he went stalk- 
ing about through Christendom in austere per- 
pendicularity with the air of a displeased school 
inspector, and with such general reluctance to 
approve as recalls Sydney Smith's thrust at Jef- 
frey, when he told Jeffrey to his face that he 
w^ould expect him to condemn the solar system — 
"badly lighted, planets too distant, pestered with 
comets, feeble contrivance — could make a better 
myself with great ease." 

Arnold seems to have said within himself, "Go 
to ; the world is my schoolhouse ; I will straight- 
way instruct mankind." And it is difficult to 
refrain from thinking him a victim of "the Great 
Teacher conceit," to which the Saturday Review 
referred when, in characterizing the degenerate, 
pessimistic cynic, Nordau, it called him "a self- 
assertive, overbearing, conceited creature, bitten 
by the Great Teacher mania," and added that 
"self-conceit and obstinate self-assertion Jiave 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 157 

been common phenomena in the professed Great 
Teachers since the beginning of things." Cer- 
tain it is that Matthew Arnold had the pro- 
pensities of a pedagogue in an exaggerated de- 
gree. In season and ont of season he lectured 
mankind as if they were his pupils and he their 
natural and necessary instructor. Alfred Aus- 
tin noticed that "Arnold frowned even in his very 
earliest verse, frowned as a teacher might who 
thinks he has discovered that everything is going 
amiss in the school it is his mission to conduct." 
Habitually he wears a pedagogic scowl, and the 
air of his schoolhouse is jarred by sharp repri- 
mands and frequent whacks of the ferule. He 
puts the fool's cap on most of his scholars, and 
reminds us of Cable's nervous schoolmaster who, 
when a dull class was reciting, after sending one 
pupil after another to the tail of the class, at last 
exclaimed in a burst of hysterical impatience, 
"Ze whole class go to ze foot." Herbert Spencer 
often apologized for his own extremely critical 
and exacting disposition by attributing it to the 
fact that he came of a race of schoolmasters. "A 
schoolmaster," he said, "is always correcting or 
finding fault with somebody." 

It may be said that Matthew Arnold, being the 
son of the great master of Rugby, came naturally 
enough by his pedagogic habit of mind; but be- 
tween father and son there was a noticeable 
difference. Thomas Arnold's school-mastering, 
whatever his personal defects, was manifestly 



158 THE OPEN FIRE 

impelled by love and flooded with sympathy. 
This did two things — ^it gave him an intuitive un- 
derstanding of those whom he taught, for love, 
far from being blind, is the only Argus with a 
hundred eyes to see everything that is worth see- 
ing; and also it drew his pupils to him in fond 
confidence and held them fast in bonds of rever- 
ent affection. For an authentic picture of Ar- 
nold, senior, we can desire nothing better than is 
given in young Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's letters 
written home from Rugby, which tells of Thomas 
Arnold's thanking the boys with happy tears in 
his eyes at the close of a semester, for the way 
they had done their work, and putting so much 
strong tenderness into his last sermons that the 
students could see his words were meant for some 
who were going away and especially for one boy 
whose moral welfare he was very anxious about ; 
and being so moved while delivering an ordinary 
sermon on a common occasion in Rugby chapel 
that his voice failed him, and closing abruptly, 
he bent down his head in the pulpit and sobbed 
like a child. The boy Stanley, under the effect 
of that sermon, wrote home to his sister, "I never 
saw anything that gave me more an idea of an 
inspired man. . . . He is certainly the very best 
preacher I ever heard or could wish to hear.'' We 
are not aware that the younger and severer Ar- 
nold had a heart capable of melting like that; 
and we cannot help wishing that we could find 
flowing down the slope of his schoolmastering, 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 159 

making it verdurous and bloomy, a little rill of 
that tenderness which welled copiously from the 
sweet fountains of his father's soul; if only he 
had beamed with genial warmth upon his fellow 
men — how much more we could have loved him I 
Better for a man to wear his heart upon his sleeve 
than to leave his fellow men in doubt whether he 
has any. 

Matthew himself felt and wrote correctly that 
what made his father great was "that he was not 
only a good man, saving his own soul by right- 
eousness, but that he carried so many others 
with him in his hand and saved them, if they 
would let him, along with himself"; a saying 
which recalls to us the saintly old preacher in 
Jean Ingelow's "Brothers and A Sermon," so 
"anxious not to go to heaven alone." It was 
because such things were not wanting in the 
kindlier, warmer, and more cordial Arnold that 
his influence was so wide and so subduing, and 
that the son, when in America, found, as he says^ 
his "father's memory a living power still in that 
New Hampshire community at Dartmouth Col- 
lege," as he might also have found it in many 
another institution in this w^estern land. Noth- 
ing is more certain than that a querulous and 
scolding teacher, minister, or missionary is fore- 
doomed to failure. When a man imagines himself 
to be an illuminator, a burning and a shining 
light and a diffuser of fragrance, a perfumed 
pastille burning in the House of Life, his no- 



160 THE OPEN^ FIRE 

tion is negatived and Ms mission nullified if his 
personality exudes an acrid humor and his ef- 
fluence is as smoke to the eyes and as vinegar 
to the teeth. 

That master-critic, Professor C. T. Winches- 
ter, of Wesleyan, rightly says, ^^The surest proof 
of a critic's ability is to be found in his verdicts 
upon his contemporaries." Dr. Noah Porter, of 
Yale, noted that John Stuart Mill's cold, self- 
centered, and unsympathetic temper showed it- 
self especially in his depreciatory estimates of 
most of his contemporaries. This same unsym- 
pathetic spirit is similarly manifested by our 
apostle of sweetness in his harsh comment upon 
not a few men most distinguished in the litera- 
ture of his time both in England and in Amer- 
ica. Such comments abound in his volume, 
Friendship's Garland, in which numerous per- 
sons are characterized in such a way as leads 
John Burroughs to call it "a garland made 
up mainly of nettles"; a fair sample be- 
ing this garland of nettles for the brow 
of Mr. Sala: "He blends the airy epicure- 
anism of the salons of Augustus with the 
full-bodied gayety of our English cider-cellar." 
When a new volume of Modern Painters ap- 
peared, the author of "Sweetness and Light" 
commented on Ruskin thus: "The man and his 
character too febrile, irritable, and weak to al- 
low him to possess the or do concatenatioque 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 161 

coming as dogmatic as Ruskin, Arnold an- 
swered that the difference between them was that 
Ruskin was dogmatic and wrong. Even toward 
Tennyson his tone is almost contemptuous. He 
feels but slight interest in the Laureate's work, 
he says, and his conviction is firm that Tenny- 
son will not finally take a high rank in litera- 
ture. With his usual chivalrous magnanimity 
he once wrote, "I do not think Tennyson a great 
or powerful spirit in any line; the real truth is 
he is deficient in intellectual powder.'' But while 
he put a low estimate on Tennyson, he evi- 
dently regarded himself as a superior in- 
tellectual and literary force, for, as the Even- 
ing Post once said, Arnold always "analyzed 
his own poetical powers and prospects with 
undisguised self-respect.'' It is perfectly plain 
that he thought himself Tennyson's superior 
as a thinker and a poet. No wonder Tenny- 
son, on being asked if he would like to have Mat- 
thew Arnold invited to a London dinner party 
that was being arranged for, answered that he 
"didn't much like dining with gods." The Fort- 
nightly said editorially: "Arnold believed him- 
self both a poet and prose- writer of the first rank. 
He said more than once : ^Tennyson has no ideas, 
Browning's are hidden under scoriae; mi/ poems 
are of gold, seven times refined.' In this self- 
estimate he was mistaken. He was, rather, a 
poet of distilled distinction and sterilized cul- 
tivation than of inspiration, passion, and power. 



162 THE OPEN FIRE 

By intellect shall no man storm heaven: the 
great of heart alone do that." 

Arnold's self-reverence exceeded his self- 
knowledge, and reminds us of ZangwilFs humor- 
ous saying that, "the way Mr. Stead believes in 
himself is quite refreshing in these atheistic 
times when some men believe in no god at all." 
It is undeniable that Matthew Arnold mani- 
fested the temper and temperature which made 
London society nickname Monckton Milnes 
(Lord Houghton) "The cool of the evening," and 
which made an irreverent w ag say of Dr. Thomp- 
son, master of Trinity College, "He casteth forth 
his ice like morsels; w^ho can stand before his 
cold?" Arnold's coldness never seemed more 
heartless than in the hour w^hen all England was 
startled by Thackeray's being found dead in bed 
the morning before Christmas, 1863. In that 
very hour, under the first shock of the tidings, 
the great apostle of sweetness wrote, with spite- 
ful promptitude, his immediate and almost only 
word concerning the still uncoffined dead, "I 
cannot say that I thoroughly liked him, and he 
is not, to my thinking, a great writer." A 
thorny sprig, indeed, without flower or even leaf, 
to fling on the breast of a corpse still almost 
w^arm enough to bleed — a tribute frosty enough 
to hasten the rigor mortis. 

A subsequent recrudescence of genuine Ar- 
noldian sweetness was in W. E. Henley's sneer at 
the deepening seriousness and religiousness 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 163 

which marked Louis Stevenson's closing years at 
Samoa, when Henley, on whose sickness and lone- 
liness Stevenson had once bestowed no little ten- 
derness, wrote, "The Samoan Stevenson is too 
self-righteous a beast for me." The man who 
could perpetrate that over his dead friend should 
be sentenced to live with himself, alone, forever. 
He showed himself less noble than Stevenson, 
and Florence Earl Coates is right in her verses : 

"Had Henley died, his course half run — 
Had Henley died and Stevenson 

Been left on earth, of him to write. 

He would have chosen to indite 
His name in generous phrase — or none." 

*'Ah, well! at rest — poor Stevenson! — 
Safe in our hearts his place is won. 
There love shall still his love requite: 
His faults divinely veiled from sight, 
Whose tears had fallen in benison. 
Had Henley died!" 

Arnold similarly endeared himself to his 
American contemporaries by the way in which 
he caressed them with his claws. Concerning 
James Kussell Lowell's brilliant and triumphant 
address at Birmingham, in 1884, on "Democ- 
racy," which forced the admiration of aristo- 
cratic England, and was loudly praised even by 
the London Times, Arnold remarked with entire 
absence of enthusiasm, "I feel the want of body 
and current in the discourse as a whole." 

In one of his Essays, Arnold^ with character- 



164 THE OPEN FIRE 

istic suavity and moderation, had referred to 
Henry Ward Beecher as "a heated barbarian.'* 
Years afterward, when he heard Mr. Beecher in 
his own pulpit in Brooklyn, the Plymouth 
Church preacher was so decorous that Arnold 
thought he must have been on his good behavior 
that morning — perhaps constrained by the pres- 
ence of so formidable a critic. And that same 
Sunday, in the afternoon, he wrote home to his 
sister : "Ward Beecher told me that I had taught 
him much ; that he had read my rebukes of him 
too, and that they had done him good. Nothing 
could be in better taste than what he said.'' Ar- 
nold's habit of harping on good taste, appearing 
in this connection, recalls what Victor Hugo 
wrote to Lacoussade: "Those who talk most 
about taste in these days are the people who 
have least of it.'' Such high commendation of 
Beecher's taste as was bestowed by the nine- 
teenth-century's chief prelector on taste might 
have made the Brooklyn pastor regard it as a 
boon had he been permitted to survive his critic 
and to read in Arnold's published Letters the 
patronizing praise from his self-complacent Eng- 
lish auditor; although, after reading it, the lion 
of Plymouth pulpit might scratch his humble 
head and try to remember what it was that 
Lowell wrote about "A Certain Condescension in 
Foreigners." 

When Max Miiller, who knew Arnold well, 
tells us that "he could be very patronizing," we 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 165 

have no difficulty in believing it. Nor can we 
wonder much when Leslie Stephen, in his 
Studies of a Biographer^ speaking of Arnold, 
with whom he was personally intimate, and not- 
ing some of his sharp sayings, writes: "I con- 
fess that on several trying occasions in my life I 
have wished that I had a little sweetness and 
light in me, so that I, too, might be able to say 
nasty things about my enemies." And yet the 
sweet gentleman, whose friends talk thus about 
him, strenuously emphasized to his contempo- 
raries the beauty of urbanity, the necessity of 
cultivating persuasiveness and charm, and at 
Oxford they still talk of his "sweet reasonable- 
ness." He is the same man whose graces evoked 
from one admirer the effusive statement that 
"only a thousand years of England could pro- 
duce an Arnold" ; the same man in whom. Canon 
Farrar said, we behold "The sum of fair six 
thousand years' tradition of civility." There are 
circles still where the name of Matthew Arnold 
is sacrosanct, where criticism of him is sacrilege, 
and his image is set up as an ikon for adulation 
and osculation. 

Arnold tells us that, in a day when Bentham 
was loudly cried up as the renovator of modern 
society, whose ideas ought to guide and govern 
the future, he — Arnold — read in Bentham's 
Deontology Bentham's depreciation of the wis- 
dom of Socrates and Plato; and, from the mo- 
ment of reading that, Arnold was delivered from 



166 THE OPEN FIRE 

the possibility of being in mental bondage to 
Bentham; he felt, he says, the inadequacy of 
Bentham's mind for supplying to human society 
any wise and perfect rule. In like manner, when 
we read Arnold's disparagement of such men as 
Ruskin and Tennyson, Thackeray, Lowell, and 
the rest, we lost whatever confidence we may 
have had in Arnold's wisdom, fair-mindedness, 
discernment, sense, sanity, and good taste. 

John Foster knew some people whose "sensi- 
bilities were a mere bundle of aversions." He 
would have found in Arnold a person whose 
antipathies, predominating over his sympathies, 
bristled against entire classes of his fellow men 
like quills upon the fretful porcupine. 

His most vehement and vociferous antipathy 
is toward the Middle Class. Much to the mar- 
ring of page 35 of the essay on "Sweetness and 
Light," he repeats the phrase "middle class" 
eight times in a space of nineteen lines, reprobat- 
ing "middle-class liberalism," "middle-class par- 
liaments," "middle-class vestries," "middle-class 
industrialists," "middle-class dissent," and "mid- 
dle-class Protestantism." 

Everything "middle class" is repulsive. He 
dislikes Cobden because he is a representative 
of the middle class, and Hepworth Dixon's liter- 
ary style because it is "middle-class Macau- 
layese." He is disgusted, he says, at "the im- 
mense vulgar-mindedness and real inferiority of 
the English middle class." But probably Kip- 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 167 

ling is nearer the truth when he says in "The 
Drums of the Fore and Aft/' that "God has 
arranged that a clean-run youth of the British 
middle class shall, in the matter of backbone, 
brains, and bowels, surpass all other youths.'^ It 
is in the middle class mostly that Arnold finds 
the British "Philistine," whom he despises, ab- 
hors, and unmercifully belabors. One of the 
worst things which he finds in the middle class 
is their dissentingness^ which is to Arnold as the 
noisome pestilence. He speaks of a certain daily 
newspaper as being "a true reflexion of the ran- 
cor of Protestant Dissent in alliance with all the 
vulgarity, meddlesomeness and grossness of the 
British multitude." Stopford Brooke says, "Ar- 
nold almost hated Nonconformists." His haughty 
ex cathedra tone toward Dissenters is worthy of 
the Pope of Rome, toward whom, by the way, it is 
clear, he feels more tolerance and affiliation. His 
writings make us certain that he would rather 
be a papist than a Congregationalist, Presby- 
terian, or Methodist. From an aristocratic club- 
house in London he writes to his mother, "I 
mean to deliver the middle class out of the hands 
of their dissenting ministers." Whether he 
means to deliver them over to the Anglican Es- 
tablishment or to the deputy-deity on the Tiber or 
to his own Church of Modern Culture of which he 
was the self-elected pontiff, he does not intimate, 
and we are left to conjecture. Once, for a wonder, 
he so far forgets his intolerance as to recognize a 



168 THE OPEN FIRE 

superior and saving value in the influence of 
Dissenters, when, speaking of Oxford University, 
he expresses the hope that "the infusion of Dis- 
senters' sons, of that muscular, hardworking, 
unblase class — for this it is,'' he says, "spite of 
its abominable disagreeableness — may brace the 
flaccid sinews of Oxford a little." Can it be 
that the soft, luxurious, and blase circles of 
aristocratic culture need to be and can be braced 
by an infusion of intellectual robustness, moral 
decision, and active energy from the ranks of the 
Dissenters? Arnold had to concede it, and we 
incline to agree with him when we look on 
the one side at the general intellectual impo- 
tence and sterility of the dainty and self-indul- 
gent classes, and on the other at the range of 
mental virility, fecundity, and force included be- 
tween Herbert Spencer and Rudyard Kipling, 
both hereditary products of one section of Dis- 
senters, the Wesleyan Methodists; and again, 
when we hear W. Robertson Nicoll reporting 
that, by the general testimony of booksellers, the 
Nonconformists are the great book-buyers of 
England ; and yet again, when we hear one of the 
most eminent publishers in London saying that 
he sometimes thinks there is scarcely anything 
vital and powerful in the English life of to-day 
that has not proceeded from some Nonconform- 
ist home. But in spite of all this, the cult of mod- 
ern culture still apes Arnold's Anglican cant 
even in America, where there is least excuse for 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 169 

it. In criticizing a popular drama William Win- 
ter used this acrid phrase, "The stoniest Dis- 
senter that ever soured the milk in an English 
middle-class household/' in which expression, if 
it was meant seriously, we get the true Arnoldian 
flavor of puckery green-persimmon juice. 

Arnold's antipathy toward Dissenters extends 
also to all Evangelicals, Anglican as well as 
Nonconformist, the Evangelicals outside the An- 
glican body differing in his esteem from those 
inside only, as the old Edinburgh Review said, 
in the "finer shades and nicer discriminations of 
lunacy," and, as Arnold would add, in somewhat 
direr degrees of disagreeableness. His dislike 
of Evangelicals made him call Bunyan "a Phil- 
istine seer," an epithet which strikes Professor 
Woodberry as containing more vinegar and dark- 
ness than sweetness and light. Such an Evan- 
gelical as Lord Ashley, seventh Earl of Shaftes- 
bury, was to Arnold an obnoxious type — Shaftes- 
bury, the churchman who consorted in the unity 
of the spirit and the bonds of love with Spurgeon 
and Moody for the saving of the multitudes — 
Shaftesbury, the nobleman, who spent himself 
and his wealth for the poor and the vicious, the 
friendless and the oppressed — Shaftesbury, 
whose great heart exulted with holy joy, in his 
honored old age, in being able to say, "In thirty 
years we have taken one hundred and twenty 
thousand waifs and strays off the streets of Lon- 
don and found honest employment and decent 



170 THE OPEN FIRE 

homes for them" — Shaftesbury, whose inexpress- 
ibly beautiful and immeasurably beneficent life- 
work poured floods of light and sweetness into 
uncounted thousands of dark and embittered 
lives in regions which never saw the face nor so 
much as knew the name of Matthew Arnold — 
Shaftesbury, the ardent Evangelical, who so 
manifestly belonged to the glorious company of 
the apostles of Christ-like sweetness that to say 
his very garments smelled of myrrh, and aloes, 
and cassia, from the ivory palaces of the King of 
Love, is something more than rhetoric. Pusey 
said, "We love the Evangelicals because they 
love our Lord" ; but Arnold thrust out his tongue 
and threw his spear at whole multitudes of de- 
vout people who fervently loved the Lord, and 
who, by his own concession, "had strongly loved 
religion, which is indeed the most lovable of all 
things." It is as probable that in some instances 
his arrogant self-conceit caused him to despise 
his spiritual superiors as it is certain that his 
arrows were sometimes sharp in the hearts of the 
King's friends. This apostle of sweetness and 
light accused evangelical religion of lacking 
sweetness and light, beauty and intelligence. 
And if we may take a particular manifestation 
of evangelical religion, it seems not improper to 
say that doubtless if he had lived in the days of 
Wesley, he would have emptied the vials of his 
scorn on the startling and phenomenal religious 
revival which then swept over England ; but the 



AKNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 171 

impartial historian J. R. Green, looking back, 
sees in that memorable evangelical revival an un- 
paralleled outburst, a divine apocalypse of 
sweetness and light — a light, rich in calorific, 
actinic, and vivific rays — a sweetness which, 
wherever it w^as admitted, banished the bitter- 
ness of pride from the hearts of the haughty and 
the bitterness of envious hatred from the hearts 
of the lowly, turning the palatial home of Lady 
Huntingdon into a public house of prayer and 
washing the grimy faces of colliers clean with 
their own streaming tears of repentance. Surely 
that was a radiant and fragrant time, when, in 
the fine words of Fletcher, "Practical Religion, 
leaning on her fair daughters. Truth and Love, 
took a solemn walk through the Kingdom and 
gave a foretaste of Heaven to all that enter- 
tained her." The historian Green, not a Wes- 
leyan, after speaking of the marvelous moral and 
spiritual illumination brought to the entire life 
of England by that mighty and blessed awaken- 
ing, says, as if with Arnold's favorite phrase in 
mind, "Charles Wesley came to add sweetness to 
this sudden startling light." Certain it is that 
the joyous spirit which inspired the songful soul 
of Charles Wesley did cause that bright new day 
to ring with choral gladness, making then and 
ever since a sweeter music to the sad hearts of 
sinful and weary men than could all the old phil- 
osophies that ever sang on Argive heights; and 
the sacred poetry of that hallowed, wonderful 



172 THE OPEN FIRE 

time has carried more sweetness to the lives of 
millions in all lands and in all communions than 
the whole of Arnold's poetry and prose. The 
hymnals of all churches, from then till now, rec- 
ognize the perennial sweetness of ^'the Wesley an 
hymns which," as James Freeman Clarke, a Uni- 
tarian, has said, "spring pure and transparent 
like some divine water out of the ground of Chris- 
tian experience." 

From the eighteenth century until the twen- 
tieth, is it not the liberating, purifying, elevating, 
and enlightening influence of evangelical Chris- 
tianity rather than any fastidious aristocratic 
culture, which has made possible the sound intel- 
lectual as well as the wholesome moral life of 
modern English civilization, as surely as the 
warm gulf-stream washing England's coasts 
makes possible its physical life? Indeed, the so- 
called culture which assumes to criticize evan- 
gelical Christianity owes itself, its training, and 
its critical ability largely to the purifying and 
ennobling influence of that mighty spiritual re- 
vival which it disparages. 

Matthew Arnold's mind was too narrow to take 
in the magnitude and meaning of that vast Evan- 
gelical Movement in England which began with 
Wesley, affected ultimately the whole Anglican 
Church, made a better Britain, and largely de- 
termined the religious character of the United 
States. In that epochal movement he saw 
nothing momentous or enlarging or educative or 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 173 

refining. Yet three years after Arnold's death 
the London Spectator, affiliated largely with the 
Established Church, printed a full-page editorial 
upon John Wesley and the Wesleyan Church, 
and ended its eulogy thus : "There is yet another 
aspect of Wesleyanism which deserves to be 
noted, and for which it deserves our special re- 
spect. The Wesleyans are, and always have been, 
among the greatest and best of educators, and, 
what is more, educators of the spirit. . . . Wes- 
ley seems, indeed, to have been able to impress 
upon his often rude and unlettered followers 
from the very beginning something of his own 
fine temperament. Wesley, whatever may 
have been the defects of his natural tem- 
perament, was always and at all times a 
scholar and a gentleman, and the essentials of 
those characteristics have clung to the body he 
founded. A temper of sweetness and light, of 
wideness and yet earnestness, such as must al- 
ways mark the scholar and the gentleman, be- 
longs to the best Wesleyans, and to the society 
as a whole. . . . We have great cause to glory 
in Wesleyan activity and vitality, and be thank- 
ful for it. Truly England's debt to Wesleyanism 
is a great one, not merely spiritually and mor- 
ally, but even politically — for it was well said 
that but for John Wesley we should hardly have 
escaped the contagion of the French Revolution. 
In the present and in the future as in the past, 
we may thank God for John Wesley.'' 



174 THE OPEN FIRE 

In like spirit and to like effect, Professor 
Gold win Smith, a scholar of critical and skep- 
tical judgment, yet of historical knowledge, said 
in one of his latest years : "The religious crusade 
of John Wesley was among the strongest apolo- 
getic and defensive forces, being a practical vin- 
dication of Christianity because a demonstration 
of its power" ; and that Wesley's Church had the 
advantage of being "born, not, like the other 
Protestant bodies, in doctrinal controversy, but 
in evangelical reaction against the impiety and 
vice of the age." He also said that in the nine- 
teenth century, when German philosophy and 
criticism of the Bible invaded England, and Mil- 
man's History of the Jews appeared, minimizing 
miracles and treating Old Testament history and 
personages in the same spirit as if they were or- 
dinary and merely secular, then the English 
Evangelicals (chief among whom were the Wes- 
leyans), with "their inward persuasion of con- 
version and spiritual union with the Saviour" as 
well as the Quakers with their inner light, were 
really beyond the reach of the critics, the seculariz- 
ing historians, and the rationalizing philosophers. 
The foundations of the evangelical faith. Gold- 
win Smith clearly perceived, were too deep to be 
affected by any form of outside skeptical assault ; 
the forces of disintegration could not touch them, 
never will be able to reach them ; they are deeply 
buried in the soul and rest upon the Rock of 
Ages. Professor Smith further said that "the 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 175 

main support of orthodox Protestantism in the 
United States now is Methodism, which, by the 
perfection of its organization, combining strong 
ministerial authority with a democratic partici- 
pation of all members in the active service of the 
church, has so far not only held its own, but en- 
larged its borders and increased its power"; 
though he forecasts the diminution of its spirit- 
ual influence if "the time comes when the fire of 
enthusiasm grows cold and class-meetings lose 
their fervor.'' 

Arnold disliked the Puritans as heartily as he 
disapproved the Wesleyans. In his view Puri- 
tanism was the prison in which the spirit of the 
English people was locked up for two hundred 
years. But such a spirit toward the Puritans is 
out of date. It might have fitted the period fol- 
lowing the Restoration, when, as Macaulay tells 
us, the Puritans were so unpopular that the 
"wits of fine gentlemen," in circles of aristocratic 
culture, tried out of sheer spite to shock the 
sensitive Puritan soul by swearing huge bawdy 
oaths and uttering ribaldry foul enough to shame 
a scullion or a Billingsgate fishmonger. But 
surely Arnold's misconception and repugnance 
are conspicuously out of place in our modern 
day, when quite another reading of history and 
a different discrimination of merit are taking the 
Puritan out of the pillory and giving him credit 
for his great qualities, including his superb 
ideality and his heroic purpose to make the will 



176 THE OPEN FIRE 

of God prevail. We have reached the day when 
theologians like Fairbairn claim that the Puri- 
tan "had an imagination capable of turning the 
highest ideals into the realities of his own life" ; 
when musical critics like Krehbiel credit the 
Puritan with fine sensibilities and noble tastes; 
and when the debt of literature to Puritanism is 
emphasized by so un-Puritanic a journal as the 
London Spectator, which says, "If the essential 
Puritan spirit, the spirit which exalts the clean, 
the pure, the upright elements in human nature, 
were withdrawn from English literature, there 
would not be very much left worth reading — 
nothing left which could inspire as well as de- 
light." 

It is now being pointed out that Milton's organ 
music rolled its thunder forth from a soul made 
solemn and grand by Puritan ideals and prin- 
ciples. And the Spectator, referring to the 
Shakespearean drama, adds that "behind the 
mask of Shakespeare's imperturbable brow is the 
same spirit of which Milton himself, the spiritual 
and ascetic Puritan, is made." When John Rus- 
kin died the same journal argued that he, the 
greatest modern master of affluent, rhythmic, 
stately, and illumined prose, was on one side of 
his nature "hewn out of the granite rock of Puri- 
tanism," which accounts for the fact that his 
first concern was ever with God's kingdom and 
righteousness, while his conception of that right- 
eous kingdom was wide and ideal, without sor- 



AKNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 177 

didness or narrowness. And in Robert Brown- 
ing, Professor Dowd sees the perfect exemplifica- 
tion of the spirit of Puritanism in its amplest, 
richest, and ripest fruitage. Such are some of 
the valuations which the fair appraisals of to-day 
put upon the long disparaged Puritans. 

Indeed, it might be shown that Arnold himself 
is, in his strongest qualities, a product of the 
Puritan spirit which he thinks he abhors. 
Whence come his own lofty seriousness, his aus- 
tere devotion to his high ideals, his stringent 
self-discipline, his study of the habits and re- 
quirements of the Power which makes for right- 
eousness, his burden of spirit to rectify with 
plain words and a fearless, unhesitating hand 
what he thought wrong — whence is all this de- 
rived if not essentially from the high and earnest 
soul of the Puritan? It may be taken for granted 
that this aesthetic critic, who so abhorred the 
Puritans, would not have regarded Jonathan 
Edwards as an apostle of sweetness and light, 
nor the great spiritual awakening under him as a 
manifestation thereof. Yet Edwards, notwith- 
standing his rather stern theology, had noble 
and beautiful ideals of human perfection and 
tried to fill the world with the beauty of holi- 
ness, which he described as follows: "Holiness 
appeared to me to be of a sweet, calm, pleasant, 
charming, serene nature, which brought an in- 
expressible purity, brightness, peacefulness, and 
ravishment to the soul ; in other words, that it 



178 THE OPEN FIRE 

made the soul like a field or garden of God, with 
all manner of pleasant fruits and flowers, all 
delightful and undisturbed, enjoying a sweet 
calm and the gentle vivifying beams of the sun." 
The literary style of this extract from Edwards 
would be sharply rasped down by Arnold's crit- 
ical file, but for radiant loveliness its description 
of inward felicity and perfectness is not matched 
by any achievement or ideal of ancient Hellen- 
ism or modern Arnoldian culture. 

No review of the range of Arnold's contempt 
for the want of intelligence and refinement which 
he alleges to exist among the pious is complete 
until it recognizes that this disdain extended be- 
yond Dissenters, Evangelicals, and Puritans, 
even to universal bounds; for he actually pro- 
claims the inferiority of the religious class as a 
whole, distinctly characterizing "the religious 
world" as "a second-best public" in comparison 
with "the aristocratical world," which this 
rather snobbish aspirant for aristocratic associa- 
tions assiduously courted. 

After all this, Americans can hardly be sur- 
prised at finding some of the British censor's 
disapprovals directed against themselves. Fix- 
ing his eye upon the beginnings of our history, 
he indicates his dislike of the Pilgrim Fathers, 
and expresses his opinion that if Virgil and 
Shakespeare had sailed with the party on the 
Mayflower, those choice spirits would have 
found the Pilgrims most intolerable company. 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 179 

This is simply attributing to Shakespeare and 
Virgil, long dead and quite defenseless against 
such imposition, his own private sentiments ; sen- 
timents which, we fancy, would have been 
heartily and unanimously reciprocated toward 
Arnold by the Pilgrim Fathers if that hyper- 
critical and persistent fault-finder had been on 
board. 

Early in his life Matthew Arnold put down 
with a sharp pen the personal confession that he 
had little feeling of soul-relationship with the 
Americans, and his belief that the feeling of kin- 
ship with us does not exist at all among the 
higher classes of England. When from the shores 
of the old Mother Country, seat of an empire of 
a thousand years, he sought our "modern coasts 
whose riper times are yet to be,'' he found us 
not to his aesthetic liking— too raw and crude, 
too rough and recent — and frankly told us so. 
He noted nothing of spiritual significance in our 
life, but remarked upon our "radicalness, dissent- 
ingness, and general mixture of self-assertion and 
narrowness," in which we resemble the British 
middle class, so distressingly offensive to him. 
Indeed, he regards us as worse than that class, 
for the civilization of America as a whole is, 
he says, "distinctly inferior to that of Europe," 
and our life, as compared with life in England, is 
"uninteresting, without savor, and without 
depth." In particular he went from us feeling 
that "the badness and ignobleness of American 



180 THE OPEN FIRE 

newspapers is beyond belief." In a Chicago news- 
paper Arnold found the following description 
of himself : "He has harsh features, supercilious 
manners, parts his hair down the middle, wears a 
single eye-glass and ill-fitting clothes." It is 
said that on returning to his own country he 
went to see Mrs. Proctor. 

"What did the Americans say of you?" asked 
she. 

"They said two things," replied Arnold; "that 
my clothes did not fit, and that I was conceited." 

"Well," said the dear old lady, "I^m sure it 
wasn't true about your clothes." 

Of our Lincoln this ^^distinguished'' Briton 
spoke with something resembling disdain. He 
saw only the furrowed face, gaunt form, and ill- 
fitting clothes, and said, "He is not distin- 
guished/' having previously said of our Wash- 
ington, "He is not distinguished as was Pericles 
or Caesar." 

We have taken a sweeping survey of the 
range of Arnold's well-nigh catholic antipathies, 
and seen how his prejudices bristled like a 
cheval-de-frise between him and large classes of 
his fellow men — how he regarded as obnoxious or 
inferior the Americans, the Pilgrim Fathers, the 
Puritans, all Evangelicals and all Nonconform- 
ists; indeed, the entire body of religious people 
— and, most of all, the British "middle class." 
We have observed the tartness of his temper, and 
his ungenerous judgments upon his distinguished 



AKNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 181 

contemporaries. We have examined in him the 
peculiar type of culture which he advocated, in- 
culcated, and embodied. We trust our analysis 
of the man, his mission, and his method does not 
seem unfair, and that no one will say of it, as 
Gladstone said of Purcell's Life of Cardinal Man- 
ningy that it "left nothing for the Day of Judg- 
ment 

One thing more must be said of Arnold's apos- 
tolate. It is not possible for us to leave this 
subject without noting one fatal omission which 
mars Arnold's discussion of Ideals of Perfection 
and dooms his whole scheme for promoting the 
formation of spirit and character. His famous 
essay on "Sweetness and Light," which treats of 
the true ideal of human perfectness, takes texts 
from Epictetus the Koman stoic and also from 
Swift, but none from Saint Paul or Saint John ; 
names Virgil and Shakespeare as "souls in whom 
sweetness and light were eminent"; mentions 
Abelard in the Middle Ages, and Lessing and 
Herder in their later time as teachers who aided 
humanity toward perfection because they 
"worked powerfully to diffuse sweetness and 
light"; but nowhere in all the forty-seven pages 
of that elaborate essay on symmetrical human 
loveliness does Arnold quote or even name the 
One supreme embodiment of sweetness and light, 
the One transcendently potential Person who has 
done more to illumine and beautify the world, 
to cleanse impurity, sanify insanity, refine vul- 



182 THE OPEN FIRE 

garity, and soften asperity — to make reason and 
the will of God prevail — than all the sages of all 
the ages. 

From his very cradle this son of Thomas Ar- 
nold was taught to adore the One faultless Char- 
acter, and to imitate the One perfect Pattern. 
How could he omit from his study of Perfec- 
tion the great Teacher and Exemplar who said, 
"Be ye perfect/' and who held up before men 
the most sublime ideals ever lifted to inspire the 
human soul? Was Jesus Christ not worthy to 
be considered as an authority upon human per- 
fection, or did he not even stand in any way re- 
lated to the subject in Arnold's mind? 

The real, though unintended, effect of such 
omissions of Christ's name is only to make him 
the more conspicuous. We read that on a cer- 
tain day in Rome, when twenty illustrious fami- 
lies were represented in a notable procession, the 
spectators noticed with surprise that two citi- 
zens of conspicuous eminence and specially re- 
lated to that particular occasion, were excluded. 
The annals of Tacitus tell us that these absent 
ones were uppermost in every mind and their 
names were upon all tongues by reason of the 
public wonder excited by their absence. In like 
manner is the primacy of Jesus as the supreme 
authority and exemplar of human perfection ac- 
centuated and reproclaimed by Arnold's strange 
omission of his name. 

To omit mention of Christ was the greater un- 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 183 

fairness because the light which illumined Ar- 
nold's own vision of Perfection really came from 
Palestine more than from Hellas. That this 
fledgeling of the Rugby nest should conceive any 
ideal of human perfection which did not, even if 
unconsciously to himself, derive its beauty and 
dignity far more from the Christianity in which 
he was nursed and immersed than from pagan 
Greece, whose story he had read in books and the 
fragments of whose art he had beheld, was prac- 
tically impossible. 

The family coat of arms of Pope Leo XIII (the 
Pecci family) consists of a strip of green earth on 
which is a tree and a breadth of blue sky in which 
is a star. The light of that single star is pal- 
pably insufficient to explain the visibility and 
color of that picture. The bright greenness of 
earth and tree and even the bright blueness of the 
sky would not show so by mere starlight. The 
picture's own brightness compels us to infer an 
unincluded sun, just out of sight beyond the 
borders of the picture, from whose shining the 
strip of earth and sky must receive most of the 
light which makes them bright and clear. No 
mere star — not Sirius at his brilliantest nor Jupi- 
ter in his utmost splendor — could show such 
clear outlines and strong colors. Nothing less 
than sunlight can explain such a vivid picture of 
earth and sky. In the essay on "Sweetness and 
Light,'' Matthew Arnold paints us what may be 
called the coat of arms of the Family of the Per- 



184 THE OPEN FIRE 

feet, the earth and the sky of it purporting to be 
lit by one solitary star — the star of Hellenic cul- 
ture. But that star is not enough to explain his 
picture's brightness, which simply compels us to 
suppose the shining on it of a larger luminary 
than that reburnished Grecian star. And the un- 
included luminary, which Mr. Arnold omits to 
mention and fails to frame into his essay, but 
whose light really lies on his vision of Perfection, 
is none other than the Sun, the Sun of Righteous- 
ness, the Lord our Saviour, blessed and only 
Potentate, King of kings and Lord of lords, who 
is the Light of the world and the Sweetness of 
the earth, "Worthy at all times of worship and 
wonder," in speaking of whom we borrow for 
our homage Caponsacchi's joyous words : 

"The glory of life, the beauty of the world, the splendor of 

heaven ! 
Do I speak ambiguously? The glory, I say, and the beauty, 

I say, 
And the splendor, still say I." 

To guard again against being misunderstood 
we reiterate at the end what we said at the begin- 
ning of this writing, that our sole intention here 
has been to estimate the value of a particular 
type of culture and the fitness of its foremost rep- 
resentative to the apostolate he undertook. 

It were easy to deliver a eulogy upon Ar- 
nold's character and life, his purity of motive, his 
sincerity and candor, his laborious devotion to 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 185 

fine ideals. Often our thoughts delight to rest on 
Arnold at his best, as in these lines about the city 
missionary, entitled "East London" : 

" 'Twas August and the fierce sun over head 

Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, 
And the pale weaver, through his window seen 
In Spitalfields, looked thrice dispirited. 

"I met a preacher there I knew, and said: 

'111 and o'erworked, how fare you in this scene?* 
'Bravely!' said he; 'for I of late have been 
Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, the living dread.* 

"O human soul! as long as thou canst so 

Set up a mark of everlasting light, 
Above the howling senses' ebb and flow, 

"To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam — 

Not with lost toil thou laborest through the night! 
Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home." 

We add the noblest lines of "Rugby Chapel" 
addressed to his father's spirit : 

"But thou would'st not alone 
Be saved, my father! alone 
Conquer and come to thy goal, 
Leaving the rest in the wild. 



If in the paths of the world 
Stones might have wounded thy feet. 
Toil or dejection have tried 
Thy spirit, of that we saw 
Nothing — to us thou wast still 
Cheerful and helpful and firm! 
Therefore to thee it was given 
Many to save with thyself; 
And, at the end of thy day, 
O faithful shepherd! to come 
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand." 



186 THE OPEN FIRE 

Matthew Arnold was the noble son of a nobler 
sire, from whose high faith he fell. His culture 
was of such a type as brings men toward agnos- 
ticism and tinges life and literature with gloom 
and hopelessness. Early in the son's career his 
father expressed to Lord Coleridge serious mis- 
givings about the lack of any evangelical spirit 
in Matthew's writings. How grieved Arnold of 
Rugby would have been had he lived to hear his 
son say he was going to observe Christmas Day 
"because the incarnation was a myth of purity 
refining to family life." Though doubtless 
Thomas Arnold would be comforted could he 
know that his boy, at the end of life and on its 
very last day, was overheard repeating to himself, 
while descending the stairs in a friend's house, 
that fervid, humble, and adoring hymn of the 
Evangelical Faith, inexpressibly dear to multi- 
tudes of the faithful : 

"When I survey the wondrous cross 
On which the Prince of glory died, 
My richest gain I count but loss, 
And pour contempt on all my pride. 

"Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast, 

Save in the death of Christ, my God ; 
All the vain things that charm me most, 
I sacrifice them to his blood. 

"See, from his head, his hands, his feet. 
Sorrow and love flow mingled down: 
Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, 
Or thorns compose so rich a crown? 



ARNOLD'S APOSTOLATE 187 

"Were the whole realm of nature mine, 
That were a present far too small; 
Love so amazing, so divine, 

Demands my soul, my life, my all." 

In repeating this hymn Matthew Arnold was 
approving the faith and the creed of Isaac Watts. 

An Oxford scholar and teacher writes that 
Arnold gave up infidel views toward the end of 
his life; and Moffat, the famous biblicist, states 
that Arnold's Testament had such verses as these 
marked : "Whosoever taketh not up his cross and 
followeth me, he cannot be my disciple'' ; "Who- 
soever would save his life must lose it." 



• GLIMPSES OF THE SOUL OF GILDER 

Write "Richard Watson Gilder" on any page 
and you turn the rest of that page into the set- 
ting for a jewel. To coin the air into the sylla- 
bles of his name is to transmute oxygen and 
nitrogen into additional gold currency for the 
world. Of religious parentage and education, his 
soul was true till death to the faith of his 
fathers, and his ancestral church was ever dear 
to him. Even Professor George E. Woodberry 
detects and comments on the persistence of the 
essentially Wesleyan note in his poetry : 

"Much of Gilder's verse is exhortatory; there 
are many hymns and private prayers. It will 
surprise those who are not familiar with his poe- 
try as a whole to find how preoccupied it is with 
religious questions. God, Christ, immortality, 
sin, and sorrow — these are constant in his brood- 
ing; and amid the strangely mingled veins there 
is always something that harks back to the old 
faith, the childish nurture, the large hope. In 
some things he w^as nigh to Wesley, and it shows 
in the various voices of his verse, in his belief 
in the beneficence of sorrow, which is most Chris- 
tian, in his philanthropy, in his humilities, in his 
fervency. The chrism of his birth is on him, and, 
however enfranchised, he always speaks as a 
child of his old church." 

188 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 189 

To speak of the soul of Gilder is eminently fit 
and proper, for above all things else he "believed 
in soul, was very sure of God,'' made the most of 
his own soul and of the souls of others. At a 
gathering of physical scientists, talking with 
some of them, he said, "I'm interested chiefly in 
things of the spirit; my study is the soul." 
"Well," laughed one of them, "you may search 
me." Gilder's reply to this is in his verses en- 
titled "Souls," published in the Atlantic Monthly, 
voicing his incredulity that high souls perish like 
beasts of the field or the jungle. It was ut- 
terly incredible to him that all the high 
potencies that throbbed in human souls, 
and the intensive fires that made them men, 
not stones nor stars nor trees nor creep- 
ing things, and gave identity to every soul, mak- 
ing it individual and alone among myriads, could 
slip out of being and be lost, eternally extin- 
guished and blotted out. Before he himself went 
he gave order: "Call me not dead when I have 
gone into the company of the ever-living." 

In most cases ancestry counts for much. When 
young David went forth against Goliath, King 
Saul said to Abner, the captain of the host, "In- 
quire thou whose son the stripling is." Captain 
Abner failed to ascertain and report; but the 
king attached so much importance to the mat- 
ter that when the stripling came back from the 
fight and stood before the king with the giant's 
head in his hand, Saul said, "Whose son art thou, 



190 THE OPEN FIRE 

young man?" And David answered, "I am the 
son of thy servant Jesse, the Bethlehemite." In 
the royal mind this was of some significance. 
And whatever the dogmatic or dubitating scien- 
tists may teach concerning heredity, the question, 
^'Whose son is he?" is always pertinent and the 
answer is often enlightening, partly because par- 
entage generally determines early environment, 
partly also because the propensities and master- 
passions of the father are as apt to surge in the 
blood of the son as parental features are to reap- 
pear in the face of offspring. 

Richard Watson Gilder was the son of the 
Rev. William H. Gilder, a member of the New 
York East Conference of the Methodist Episco- 
pal Church, and w^as the natural and normal pro- 
duct of a ministerial home. The Christian vir- 
tues, integrities, and graces were the guardian 
angels, intimate comrades of his childhood. His 
youth grew in knowledge and wisdom under the 
inspiration and tutelage of ideals high and pure 
and large — ideals intellectual, ethical, and altru- 
istic. Loudest of all inviting voices and most 
alluring of all lures in the surroundings of his 
young life w^as the call of the True, the Beautiful, 
and the Good, to whose fine fosterings his soul 
was so responsive, docile, and dutiful that they 
gave tone and color to his whole life, their influ- 
ence becoming more and more overmastering as 
his years passed into their declining decades. 

Not only the quality of Gilder's soul but the 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 191 

particular bent of his activity was early deter- 
mined by heredity and environment. Studying 
and thinking for purposes of effective expression 
is the constant intellectual occupation of the min- 
ister, the chief mental industry that goes on in 
his home; and the children growing up therein 
are likely to be influenced toward the study and 
practice of expression either in oratory, or in lit- 
erature, or in art. Examples of this are numer- 
ous, and a little cluster of three of them happens 
to lie at this moment directly in our path. In 
middle New Jersey, within a circle describable by 
a radius of twenty-five miles, and within the eight 
years between 1836 and 1844, were born three 
boys in the homes of as many Methodist minis- 
ters. Rev. John Buckley, at Rahway, named his 
boy James Monroe; Rev. William H. Gilder, at 
Bordentown, named his Richard Watson; Rev. 
Benjamin Kelley called his William Valentine. 
Those three boys came, in the course of time, to 
occupy for many years editorial chairs within 
rifle-shot of each other in New York city, the first 
in the office of The Christian Advocate, the sec- 
ond in that of the Century Magazine, the third as 
editor of the Methodist Review. The mention of 
this coincidence will interest parsonages and is 
sufficiently relevant here to be pardoned by other 
homes if pardon need be asked. Richard Watson 
Gilder took to writing very early, carried print- 
er's types in his pocket instead of marbles, and at 
the age of thirteen was editing and printing with 



192 THE OPEN FIRE 

his own hands a tiny paper. Taking this direc- 
tion so early, his life, however diverted at times 
by circumstances, invariably returned to the 
course into which it finally settled. The number 
of literary careers dating from ministerial homes 
is large and not a few of them important ; a most 
notable instance of which is now^ before the public 
in the literary prominence of the three sons of 
Archbishop Benson. 

Among Gilder's most amiable and engaging 
traits were his loving pride in his parentage and 
his loyalty thereto. Of this a couple of incidents 
on notable occasions afford a glimpse. 

A few years ago the New York Methodist So- 
cial Union arranged an evening of ministers' 
sons; no others spoke; Gilder was one of the 
speakers. His own Methodist ancestry seemed 
to him a theme as suitable to that occasion as it 
was congenial to his ow^n heart; and he talked 
about it as simply and informally as if at an old- 
home reunion of relatives and familiars. The 
subject also chanced to be at that moment upper- 
most in his mind, for the reason that he had been 
recently in Philadelphia looking up the records 
of his grandfather, who was John Gilder, a 
builder (whose name and occupation, chiming to- 
gether, were enough to set rhyming a-going in the 
family). This grandfather built Girard College 
and with his own hands laid its corner stone, so 
that the anti-clerical spirit of Stephen Girard, if 
it saw anything earthly, saw the corner stone of 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 193 

his college put in place by a Methodist class 
leader, which must have been almost as grievous 
to the prejudiced soul of Stephen as if it had been 
laid by an ordained minister of the gospel. 
Grandfather Gilder, besides being a religious 
leader, was an enterprising and progressive civic 
force, an active and influential member of the City 
Council. (At this point in the story which Rich- 
ard Watson Gilder told the Social Union, he 
paused to interject a wondering query as to how 
much the Philadelphia City Council is nowadays 
under the leadership of Methodist class leaders. ) 
The old records of the City Council show that 
John Gilder was one of the chief advocates for 
permitting the introduction of illuminating gas 
into Philadelphia, against the stout opposition of 
timid unprogressives who argued in agreement 
with Sir Humphry Davy that so inflammable 
and explosive a substance would surely blow up 
the city and destroy a multitude of lives. This 
grandfather spent his last years in the home of 
his son, the Rev. William H. Gilder, then princi- 
pal of Saint Thomas School at Flushing, Long 
Island, New York, where the boy, Richard Wat- 
son, regarded the good old man with veneration, 
and heard many sacred words and devout expres- 
sions fall from his aged lips, especially in the 
chamber where the godly patriarch breathed his 
last, and when his reverent mind, wandering on 
the verge of life eternal, was full of Bible words 
and prayer meeting and class meeting talk. Gil- 



194 THE OPEN FIKE 

der related how his grandfather, like the father 
of William Hazlitt, the English essayist, "went 
on talking of glory, honor, and immortality to 
the last.'' When Kiehard Watson Gilder, speak- 
ing at the age of sixty to the New York Social 
Union at the Savoy, had finished with dear old 
John Gilder and was about to refer to his own 
father next in order, his voice was in danger of 
breaking into a sob, and he was prevented by his 
emotions from going further on that subject. 
Then and there we felt the throb of Gilder's soul, 
filial, tender, loyal, and affectionate. 

A similar manifestation was witnessed at Wes- 
leyan University in commencement week, 1903, 
when the college celebrated the bicentennial of 
John Wesley's birth. The exercises on Tuesday 
evening consisted of a masterly portraiture of 
"Wesley as a Man" by Professor C. T. Winches- 
ter, and a poem by Gilder, whose participation in 
that particular celebration was most fitting be- 
cause of his Methodist ancestry and his name, 
Richard Watson ; while his presence at Wesleyan 
University on any occasion was natural enough, 
because it was his father's college and would have 
been his own too, had not the Civil War and his 
father's death deprived him of a college course. 
With Dr. J. M. Buckley offering the prayer and 
the writer of this record presiding, this also was 
to a fourfold extent an evening of ministers' sons. 
Before the exercises began. Gilder said to the 
chairman of the evening, "If I break down please 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 195 

take my manuscript and finish the reading for 
me"; to which the uncomprehending chairman 
blindly responded, "There will be no need of that, 
I am sure/' and thereafter sat wondering what 
the poet's request could have meant. After more 
than sixty lines in praise of Wesley, Gilder came, 
in the reading of his poem, to a remembrance of 
his own father, who was chaplain of the Fortieth 
New York Regiment and who died of smallpox at 
Brandy Station, Virginia, in 1864, while minis- 
tering to the spiritual and physical needs of his 
soldiers, suffering with that loathsome disease in 
the regimental hospital. Gilder's tribute to Wes- 
ley closed with this prayer : 

"Send us again, O Spirit of all Truth! 
High messengers of dauntless faith and power 
Like him whose memory this day we praise, 
We cherish and we praise with burning hearts. 
Let kindle, as before, from his bright torch, 
Myriads of messengers aflame with thee 
To darkest places bearing light divine! 
As did one soul, whom here I fain would sing, 
Since here in youth his gentle spirit took 
New fire from Wesley's glow." 

And then came this filial tribute: 

"How oft have I, 
A little child, barkened my father's voice 
Preaching the Word in country homes remote, 
Or wayside schools, where only two or three 
Were gathered. Lo, again that voice I hear, 
Like Wesley's, raised in those sweet fervent hymns 
Made sacred by how many saints of God 



196 THE OPEN FIRE 

Who breathed their souls out on the well-loved tones. 

Again I see those eager, circling faces; 

I hear once more the solemn-urging words 

That tell the things of God in simple phrase; 

Again the deep-voiced, reverent prayer ascends, 

Bringing to the still summer afternoon 

A sense of the eternal. As he preached 

He lived; unselfish, famelessly heroic. 

For even in mid-career, with life still full, 

His was the glorious privilege and choice 

Deliberately to give that life away 

For country and for comrades; for he knew 

No rule but duty, no reward but Christ." 

When the poet in his reading reached this tender 
reference to his father his voice grew tremulous, 
almost inaudible except to those in the front 
seats. Emotion came near choking his utterance 
entirely; the now comprehending chairman 
leaned forward on the edge of his seat, ready to 
take the manuscript and obey Gilder's request; 
but in a few moments the reader controlled the 
inward tumult, recovered his force of utterance, 
and proceeded with distinctness. Then and there 
we felt once more the sensitiveness, the surging 
affectionateness of Gilder's soul, deep and tidal 
like the sea. This filial tribute calls to mind, 
from Jean Ingelow's "Brothers and a Sermon," 
that good old village pastor, "so anxious not to 
heaven alone." The spirit and faith of his father 
fired the soul of Richard Watson Gilder. He too, 
was, in his way, a preacher and prophet. To one 
who praised "The Gay Life" he cried warning 
and alarm : 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 197 

"'Gay'!— as the hot crater's crust all lightning-lit — 
But one tread more, and horror of the pit! 
'Gay'? Yes, for a moment, and then weeping sorrow, 
With wild remorse to meet the dawning morrow." 

Through his parentage he received by heredity 
and caught by contagion the passion for saving 
and serving men, a passion which came from the 
heart of Christ into the soul of Wesley and made 
him mighty. J. R. Green, in his Short History of 
the English People, after noticing the effect of 
the Methodist revival upon religion and morals, 
goes on to say : "A yet nobler result of the reli- 
gious revival was the steady attempt, which has 
never ceased from that day to this, to remedy the 
guilt, the physical suffering, the social degrada- 
tion of the profligate and the poor. A passionate 
impulse of human sympathy with the wronged 
and afflicted raised hospitals, endowed charities, 
built churches, sent missionaries to the heathen." 
When Gilder was ill in bed for two weeks from 
sheer exhaustion after the overstrain of his year's 
unsparing labor as head of a Commission ap- 
pointed to investigate the condition of the tene- 
ments in the city slums, we told him that what 
ailed him was that he was his father's son, 
troubled with a Christian conscience and bur- 
dened with an inescapable sense of responsibility 
for the welfare of his fellow men and for the sav- 
ing of the world. This he freely admitted, and 
said emphatically that the explanation was per- 
fectly true. 



198 THE OPEN FIRE 

It might be interesting to hear the readers of 
Gilder's poetry guess which of the Nine Muses 
was the main source of his inspiration and pre- 
sided over his literary work. About this prob- 
ably he himself knew best, and we happen to have 
his own word for it. Once, when we wrote him 
expressing appreciation of his most recent poem, 
and our wonder that a man of sixty, carrying so 
many and varied responsibilities, engaged in so 
many practical movements, and leading all the 
time so stirring and strenuous a life, could pro- 
duce so much good poetry, he wrote in reply : 
"The good old Methodist Lord, who, I sometimes 
think, is, after all, my chief Muse, has been very 
good to me of late.'' And he went on to say that 
more poems had come to him in the two preceding 
years than in any equal period of his life. Ad- 
dressing a thousand college girls at Wellesley, 
this man, who was the embodiment of exquisite 
sensitiveness, critical literary and artistic taste, 
and refined culture, talked of "the good old- 
fashioned power of salvation." In temperament, 
tone, and conviction Gilder was true Wesleyan. 
Under a gentle manner and soft voice was a white 
heat of spiritual emotion, a depth of tender sym- 
pathy, a copious flow of sweet and noble feeling. 
The genial sunlit, warm-hearted, and fervent 
faith which sweetened, brightened, and ennobled 
the home of his childhood was congenial as well 
as congenital. 

A newspaper man had a glimpse of the soul of 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 199 

Gilder one evening in one of the thronged streets 
of the lower East Side. The column-long account 
in the New York Sun was headed "A Poet in the 
Slums." It pictured the editor of the Century 
Magazine mounted on a dray that was standing 
idle in the street and discoursing earnestly to the 
motley polyglot crowd that swarms at night in 
those "smelly'' streets. The gaping crowd, halted 
by the unwonted spectacle, listened wonderingly 
to this poet trying to impart to them some of his 
own ideas and ideals for their enlightenment and 
uplift. From the refined comfort of his home this 
artist-soul, after a day of toil, had come down 
into repulsive conditions for the sake of poor, 
ignorant mortals, impelled thereto by the divine 
notion, the benign Christian superstition, that he 
was his brother's keeper, and that the strange, 
unfortunate folk in the slums w^ere his brothers. 
The reporter did not concern himself much with 
the poet's message to the proletariat, but seemed 
chiefly impressed with the pathetic futility, al- 
most absurdity, of the effort, since what was said 
must be mostly unintelligible to the tenement- 
house crowd, toward whom the poet was reaching 
across a great gulf. Yet the Sun reporter could 
have nothing but respect and admiration for the 
high-souled gentleman who was capable of such a 
mission, and his account closed with a note al- 
most reverential. However futile this sentimental 
altruistic expedition into Slumdom seemed to the 
bright young newspaper man, the "Poet in the 



200 THE OPEN FIRE 

Slums" came to be, along with Jacob Riis and 
Theodore Roosevelt, one of the slum's best 
friends, a potent practical force for the reform of 
abuses and relief of miseries for the benefit of the 
suffering tenement house population in New 
York. In 1894 exposures of the shameful and 
cruel conditions of many tenements led to the ap- 
pointment by Governor Flower of a commission 
to investigate these conditions and report, the 
Governor naming Richard Watson Gilder as 
chairman. It wrought a revolutionary and lasting 
reform, and is known to this day as the Gilder 
Commission, because the chairmanship and the 
chief burden and credit of its work were his. 

Some picturesque reporter might have written 
up "A Poet as Fireman,'^ picturing Gilder in 
fireman's helmet and water-proof suit, running to 
fires with the engines, at all hours of the night, 
till he became almost an idol with the fire depart- 
ment, which had orders to call him for every fire 
in the tenement region between bedtime and 
morning, in order that he might study for 
himself conditions and cause of the all-too-fre- 
quent and disastrous fires there. When a visitor 
from England in 1911, familiar with the slums of 
English cities, tells us, after going through the 
slumdom of our American metropolis, that our 
slums are paradise compared with the dark, 
gloomy, sour, and sunless courts and alleys 
known to him in the East End of London, he is 
unwittingly paying tribute of praise to Richard 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 201 

Watson Gilder, to whom more than to any other 
one man the tenement regions owe their light and 
air and sanitary conditions and children's play 
grounds. This "Poet in the Slums" was a mira- 
cle-working good angel to the friendless and de- 
fenseless. His heart "mothered'' the children of 
the slums, and his splendid rage fought fiercely 
against plutocratic greed and the hinderers of 
reform even when, and most of all when, the in- 
fernal opposition came from that richest of eccle- 
siastical landlords, the Trinity Corporation. 
William Winter wrote of George William Cur- 
tis: "When he heard the distant sound of the 
street-organ, his spirit floated away in a dream of 
the mellow richness of Italy; yet he was a man 
who could have ridden with Cromwell's troopers 
at Naseby, and given his life for a cause," which 
is even truer of Gilder than of Curtis, for Gilder 
was the more spiritual and selfless and heroic of 
the two. We cannot help longing for a statue 
from the hand of his friend. Saint Gaudens, of 
the slender figure of this "Poet in the Slums" 
mounted on a dray like a street-preacher, or rush- 
ing into a blazing tenement in fireman's uniform. 
To serve and to save, in a spirit not less than 
Christlike, was the impulse and the purpose of 
his life. And all this was largely due to the 
Christian hands that rocked, and the prayers that 
diffused their holy fragrance around, his cradle ; 
the atmosphere in which he was born and reared. 
Gilder had the soul of a noble citizen. New 



202 THE OPEN FIKE 

York was the city of his heart, and in many a line 
he sang with enthusiasm of the 

"City of glorious days. 

Of hope and labor and mirth, 
With room and to spare on thy splendid bays 
For the ships of all the earth." 

Bear was the murmuring Delaware that afar 
through his childhood flowed, and dear the four 
little crystal rivers that gave name to his Ty- 
ringham farm amid the green Berkshire hills; 
but, to the heart of this great citizen, no music 
was ever "half so sweet as the thunder of Broad- 
way." "This is the end of the town that I love 
best," sang Gilder of Washington Square and its 
neighborhood when he lived there in a vine- 
fronted house, in a region having literary asso- 
ciations and a Latin Quarter. There, where Fifth 
Avenue starts out of the little park on its long 
and increasingly magnificent northward reach, 
stands now a great white arch, shaped not very 
unlike the Arc de Triomphe which crests the 
Champs Elysee. Keared to commemorate the 
Father of his Country, it may be regarded as also 
in some degree a memorial of Gilder, since it was 
placed there through his initiative, advocacy, and 
active urgency. That arch of stone is a lasting 
token both of Gilder's love for art, which he did 
much to foster, and of his love for his town, which 
he did his best to make the City Beautiful and 
Righteous. To call him a superb and ideal citi- 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 203 

zen is no exaggeration. Certainly no other man 
of letters ever resident in New York served the 
city so unselfishly, variously, valiantly, and 
memorably; none has left so deep and durable 
a mark on its face and fortunes ; not Washington 
Irving, nor R. H. Stoddard, nor E. C. Stedman, 
nor even George William Curtis. Carrying the 
welfare of the city on his heart, he could not sit 
with folded hands, merely wishing that ill might 
cease, but must needs off with his coat for hard 
work to right whatever was going wrong. And 
to this end he was "ready to preach, or pray, or 
fight, or sing a song," whichever would serve the 
good cause most. When he saw that this huge 
Town was a place 

"Where love of God had turned to lust of gold, 
And civic pride in private greed grew cold; 
Where foul corruption stained the judge's gown, 
And where the hase-born broods, like beasts of prey. 
Ravaged the treasure-house by night and day," 

then heroic rage flamed in his soul; his gentle 
fingers clenched into a fist; his song turned into 
a sword, with which he smote in splendid fury. 
Once, in the heat of a political struggle, the vul- 
gar and malignant yellow journal which had in- 
stigated the murder of the gentle and Christianly 
McKinley by cartooning him persistently as a 
hideous and hateful monster, too abominable to 
live, sneered at Gilder as a mild "imitation of a 
young girl" ; offering thus unconscious homage to 



204 THE OPEN FIRE 

his fineness and spotlessness, and posing Ms slen- 
der, spiritual, patriotic figure in contrast with 
the thick-necked, heavy- jawed huskies who were 
bullying and brutalizing and looting the town. 
He was a sword of the spirit; he was a word of 
God. 

Nothing is more wise for a city than to monu- 
ment its most worthy and useful sons. A suit- 
able Gilder Memorial should be inevitable. From 
Columbia University came the proposal of a 
fund of $100,000 to endow scholarships in that 
institution to train men for the "Promotion of 
Good Citizenship." This, while not unsuitable, 
seems a somewhat cloistered memorial, removed 
from public sight, for a career so public and stir- 
ring. Nearer the people he served most, and the 
scenes of his most humane labors, is the sugges- 
tion that a bust of Gilder should look down on 
one of the Children's Playgrounds which he se- 
cured. But a monument in some most central 
and public place would do more for the city's 
credit and for the instruction and uplift of future 
generations. As good old Peter Cooper sits for- 
ever benignly in bronze in Cooper Square, so a 
statue of Richard Watson Gilder might well or- 
nament Madison Square; and the fitness of 
things might be served if it should replace the 
inartistic and uninspiring effigy now occupying 
the southeast corner, recalling little more than 
imperious, strutting, and petulant leadership of 
a splitting and rancorous faction in one political 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 205 

party in a period already and desirably well-nigh 
forgotten — a bronze figure whose conspicuous 
presence is to the community a mystery and a 
mortification. 

To those who love a man it is not his fame that 
makes him dear. One friend remembers most in 
Gilder his smile, his daily living, and his eyes. 
In days when he misses him most, he wishes the 
long day through for a sight of Gilder's smile. 
When he heard poets chanting over Gilder's dust, 
"his shining deeds, his star-strewn way," what 
seemed lovelier than all in his recollection was 
just Gilder's pure and simple living day by day. 
And this friend's tribute to Gilder closed thus ; 

"Nor spires nor creeds have ever yet 
Fashioned for me a paradise; 
But all my unfaith I forget, 
Remembering his eyes." 

In self-communication, the most wonderful me- 
dium of expression is the face. In human na- 
ture's canon, the book of Revelation is at the 
front, not at the back ; the face is an apocalypse, 
revealing the soul and reflecting its visions ; the 
most expressive feature being the eye, the special 
organ through which the spirit leans out on the 
window sill and looks at us. At the Gilder Me- 
morial in Mendelssohn Hall, New York city, 
where that great citizen and statesman Charles 
E. Hughes spoke, with Hamilton W. Mabie, 
Jacob Riis, Talcott Williams, and Nicholas Mur- 



206 THE OPEN FIRE 

ray Butler, only once was mention made of Gil- 
der's eye and then in quoted words not overapt, 
"His mild and magnificent eye." His was not an 
"eye in a fine frenzy rolling.'' It was too grave 
and sober for even the slightest touch of poetic 
frenzy; though sometimes in the midst of 
animated practical conversation his eyes went 
dreamy in an instant, as if they saw past 
us and beyond to some land that is very 
far off or had vision of some King in 
his beauty. The only eyes that Gilder's made 
us think of were those of Hiram Powers, the 
American sculptor, as we saw them many years 
ago in his Florentine studio, while he went about 
among his works explaining them to us. His 
Greek Slave was not so fine as the sculptor's eye, 
almost bovine in size and serenity — large, benign, 
tranquil, ruminating, full of meditative serious- 
ness and spiritual calm. Charles Reade declared 
he had never seen such eyes as Hawthorne's, and 
Bayard Taylor spoke of them as the only eyes 
he had ever known to really flash fire. An old 
gypsy woman, meeting young Hawthorne on a 
woodland path in his student days, gazed with 
wonder on his handsome face and into his dark 
blue eyes, and asked, "Are you a man or an 
angel?" In his poem beginning "Call me not 
dead," Gilder thinks that, if he should meet Keats 
wandering in starry places, he would know him 
by his eyes, though he had never seen Keats. We 
who have often looked into Gilder's eyes could, 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 207 

by them alone, easily know him among thousands 
of thousands in the starry places. And the soul 
that half revealed and half concealed itself in 
them was fit comrade for the highest of "the 
bright intelligences fair in circle round the 
blessed gates." 

A living soul and a quickening spirit, a potent, 
pervasive, and inciting force was Richard Wat- 
son Gilder, always and everywhere the presence 
of a good diffused. 

"He cried 'Nay, nay!' to the worldling's way; 
To the heart's clear dream he whispered 'Yea!' " 

In Browning's words, he held hard by truth and 
his great soul ; did out his duty ; and 

"Through such souls alone 
God stooping shows sufficient of his light 
For men in the dark to rise by." 

In his poetry, more than anywhere else, the 
whole nature of Richard Watson Gilder is made 
manifest in full expression ; making it the volumi- 
nous and ample record of his lifetime of thought 
and feeling. No spirit more sincere, more trans- 
parent than his has revealed itself in American 
literature. Simplicity and sincerity were em- 
bodied in him. Through his limpid flowing lines 
we see the bottom of his soul as clearly as in a 
crystal brook we see the white sand and clean 
pebbles through the wimpling water. But no 
brook-like narrowness limits the flow of his sym- 
pathies ; over the wide world they go surging like 



208 THE OPEN FIRE 

waves of the sea. One has called him "lord of 
the realm of sympathy," As to topics and realms, 
no American poet known to us in the twentieth 
century has so wide and varied a range, touches 
and is touched by so many points, notes so many 
persons and events, turns into poetry so many 
incidents and occasions of nature and of life, 
both the trivial and the great. In New York his 
numerous verses on persons and events in the 
realms of art, and literature, and civic life, and 
public service, and private heroism made him the 
laureate of the city; indeed, so wide beyond his 
own town did he extend his appreciation that he 
came near being the Laureate of the Land. He 
wrote a thousand poems, and in them all not one 
machine-made uninspired verse. "Will you read 
a poem for us on such an occasion at such a time 
and place?" we asked him. 

"I cannot promise positively," he replied. "I 
will if anything comes to me; poetry cannot be 
made to order, it is born of the spirit." 

And that is why Gilder's poetry is the real 
thing; it is something inspired, and all alive with 
blood-beat and nerve-thrill. His verse is genuine 
song, lyric and rhythmic. His balanced clauses 
are as wings of singing birds that go warbling 
aloft in free yet ordered flight. Music throbbed 
through him and through his verse. But no ec- 
stasy carried him away. None of his meters 
"walked with aimless feet." Always some great 
aim lifted his lines, like guiding stars above. The 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 209 

true poet, genuinely touched by the fire divine, 
takes his mission seriously — does not waste his 
time blowing soap bubbles; earnestly wants to 
put some power in words that shall be piercing, 
bright, miraculous, with light and meaning and 
beatitude; that shall hearten the humble, ener- 
gize the listless, revive the fainting, bind up the 
bruised, hold a lantern to the lost, restore the 
erring, brand the base, and scourge the false. 
Gilder, though using no instrument but the pen, 
was as truly an artist as any man who was in his 
day handling brush or burin or modeling tools; 
yet was he a preacher as well. What preacher 
could do better than he does in his verses, "The 
Passing of Christ," giving answer to those who 
imagine that Christ no more survives, suffices, 
satisfies? Gilder's sanity is as sound as his ear- 
nestness is fervent : there is no delirium. James 
Creelman says, "There are natures so unworldly 
as to be free from any visible taint of common 
sense." Pure poet though he was, this was not 
the case with Gilder, who was as practical 
as he was poetic and pure. He had both 
the passion and the power for doing things. 
In no small degree he was a leader of 
men and a master of affairs. As up-builder 
of the great Century Magazine, which he 
edited for twenty-five years, and as an active 
and efficient force in civic reform, in the fight for 
righteousness, in humane measures of relief, he 
demonstrated beyond possibility of dispute his 



210 THE OPEN FIRE 

sound sense, practical wisdom, and sagacity. A 
very gentle nature, but a resolute spirit was Gil- 
der's. It is the mistake of the violent and the 
vicious to underestimate the pervading, f ar-carry_ 
ing, and lasting might of gentleness. Concerning 
it the ignorant deceive themselves. Take for 
teacher the most recent science. Says the Elec- 
trical Review, on the mild and minute electric 
current required by the telephone: "The pe- 
culiar electric telephone current is perhaps the 
quickest, feeblest, and most elusive force in the 
world. It is so amazing a thing that any descrip- 
tion of it seems irrational. It is as gentle as the 
touch of a baby sunbeam and as swift as the light- 
ning flash. It is so small that the electric current 
of a single incandescent lamp is greater — 500,- 
000,000 times. Cool a spoonful of hot water just 
one degree, and the energy set free by the cooling 
will operate a telephone for ten thousand years. 
Catch the falling tear-drop of a child and there 
will be sufficient waterpower to carry a spoken 
message from one city to another." Beware of 
the gentle, modest, mild-mannered, quiet-spoken 
man; for his manner is an understatement; his 
unadvertised overplus may give you a drink of 
"the wine of astonishment." He employs no 
trumpeter, begins not blusteringly. You are in 
danger of accounting his unmenacing front as 
evidence of feebleness. But beware of the last 
half of the game. When he brings up his reserves 
the battle is likely to go against you, whoever 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 211 

you are. Chinese Gordon was such an one, the 
famous type of a dynamic though quiet class of 
men who, fearing God, fear nothing else. "Va- 
liant Ruskin I'- once cried Thomas Carlyle in ir- 
repressible admiration of his friend. Let us cry, 
"Valiant Gilder!" inasmuch as from the time 
when, a slender stripling, he marched under the 
flag with Landis^ Philadelphia Battery to fight 
for liberty and union in the sixties, all down 
through forty years to the last fight for decent 
politics and honest city government, his was a 
valiant life. Helen Gray Cone dedicates her 
volume of verse entitled Soldiers of the Light to 
Gilder, because, she says, "He served all his years 
a Soldier of the Light.'' He tempered his blade 
in altar-fire, and marched with the angels against 
the demons. His was a blithe and sweet, but 
grave, serious, and reverent Muse, all in earnest, 
not one flippant word or frivolous line. One 
critic says that, in his verses on public themes, 
issues, and concerns, he attained a gravity and 
dignity unique in American letters. Dignity 
clothes also his love songs, which are simple 
and sweet, tender and pure and fine. His man- 
hood is incapable of the coarseness which is 
scorned of all manly men. A nature his too 
spiritual for carnal lapses, too fine for any touch 
of grossness. He is a clean visitor whose san- 
dals have not slipped in sensual mire, a decent 
guest who comes in upon our carpets without 
soiling them and leans his hands upon our door 



212 THE OPEN FIRE 

posts without smearing them. He had no toler- 
ance for "the prurient throng who soil with foul, 
empoisoned breath the sanctity of song." To one 
such (name mercifully omitted) he cried: 

"If you wish, go be a pig, 

In and out of season; 
But do not bore us with a big 
Philosophic reason"; 

and don't make excuse for what is inexcusable. 
Gilder was helpful to the younger brood of sing- 
ers by both praise and admonition. He ad- 
mired and encouraged that bright spirit, Freder- 
ic Lawrence Knowles, and paternally chastised 
that defiant cub, George Viereck, for his eroti- 
cism (accent on the "rot''), whom he had in mind 
when he wrote to a settlement worker in 1906: 

"It is hard for me to understand a nature 
craven enough to be willing to put up in this 
life with anything but the best, the most noble, 
the absolutely perfect, the spiritually highest. A 
person who says, *I am content with the shadows 
of things, the shams, the less fine, the impure,* is 
like one who should say, ^I do not like clean bread 
and meat; give me swill.' 

"Every man is inescapably the guardian of his 
soul. That is his first duty in the world, to keep 
that soul of his clean. If he betrays his trust, he 
is not only a cowardly deserter, but he cannot 
escape by this default from injuring other souls, 
either through occasioning grief or by contam- 
ination. 



THE SOUL OF GILDEE 213 

"Aside from these ethics there is such a thing 
as moral taste. A man should be ten thousand 
times more ashamed of betraying bad moral taste 
than of showing bad taste in the sesthetic field. 
If a man blushes at being caught in some banal 
opinion about art, how scarlet he should turn at 
any suspicion of having a false opinion as to 
morals — Tennyson's line: Self -reverence, self- 
knowledge, and self-control. Anyone who calmly 
cuts himself off from these is a moral leper dis- 
tributing evils so far as he touches other souls 
and this continually, with effects eternal." 

The high and white morality of such a life as 
Gilder's lifts above the human stream, for men to 
gaze upon, a front as chaste, marmoreal and ma- 
jestic as the Madeleine above the thronged bou- 
levard of Paris ; and we can hear within each the 
sound of psalm and prayer and anthem. One 
noteworthiest thing is that Gilder is supremely 
religious. A letter from John A. Story comes 
to memory : "I cannot put into word just what 
Gilder's poems are to me. I would say ^delicious' 
if the word were not so sensuous and his work so 
spiritual. He says something for Christ that I 
do not find said with the same buoyant tone in 
any other American poet. (I am not ashamed 
to say that I love him too for his rime. Gilder's 
rime is a flower appearing in spiral round the 
stem from which it naturally grows, and he cer- 
tainly uses it for what Mr. Hutton calls its 
legitimate function, ^the delicate and definite 



214 THE OPEN FIRE 

clasping of thought to thought.')'' Gilder's Com- 
plete Poems is the most positively, saturatedly, 
and devoutly Christian volume of poetry known 
to us in its decade. While not quite so singular 
and individual as Lanier, the two spirits are in 
close kinship, though Gilder is the more deeply, 
intelligently, and expressively Christian, just as 
his realm is wider, his knowledge more extensive, 
his citizenship larger, his industry more fruitful, 
his contact with the world of men and affairs 
more vital and intimate — all this making him a 
far mightier power for good ; indeed, nothing less 
than a great moral force, a noble, delightful, ad- 
mirable citizen. He knew that the pure in heart 
see the great realities and have all the real joy of 
life, and he cried : 

"Keep pure thy soul! 
Then shalt thou take the whole 
Of delight; 

Then, without a pang. 

Thine shall be all of beauty whereof the poet sang — 
The perfume and the pageant, the melody, the mirth 
Of the golden day and the starry night; 
Of heaven and of earth. 
0, keep pure thy soul!" 

He knew the value of his father's faith, and 
cried : 



'Despise not thou thy father's ancient creed; 
Of his pure life it was the golden thread 
Whereon bright days were gathered, bead by bead, 
Till death laid low that dear and reverend head. 



THE SOUL OF GILDER 215 

From olden faith how many a glorious deed 
Hath lit the world! Its blood-stained banner led 
The martyrs heavenward; yea, it was the seed 
Of knowledge, whence our modern freedom spread. 
Not often has man's credo proved a snare — 
But a deliverance, a sign, a flame 
To purify the dense and pestilent air, 
Writing on pitiless heavens one pitying Name; 
And 'neath the shadow of the dread eclipse 
It shines on dying eyes and pallid lips." 

Gilder had the wisdom not to despise his father's 
ancient creed, and could consistently exhort. 
The poem which oftenest repeats itself to us of 
all that Gilder wrote is, "The Song of a Heathen" 
supposed to be sojourning in Galilee when Jesus 
was teaching there (32 a. d.), who has heard 
many and contradictory things about the won- 
derful young teacher, and perhaps has been in 
the crowds or casual companies that listened to 
him ; and who, having pondered much upon the 
question who and what Jesus is, arrives at this 
sane and sensible conclusion : 

"If Jesus Christ is a man — 

And only a man — I say 
That of all mankind I cleave to him, 
And to him will I cleave alway. 

"If Jesus Christ is a God — 

And the only God — I swear 
I will follow Him through Heaven and Hell, 
The earth, the sea, and the air!" 

And really, on any theory about Jesus Christ, 
that is the only admissible and consistent thing 



216 THE OPEN FIRE 

for any decent and sensible person to do — follow 
him and cleave to him. The most convincing of 
arguments is not an argument but a feeling — 
feeling our need of Christ, So Gilder, in a mo- 
ment of mental perplexity, writes : 

"Thou Christ, my soul is hurt and bruised! 

With words the scholars wear me out; 
My brain o'erwearied and confused, 
Thee, and myself, and all I doubt. 

"And must I back to darkness go 
Because I cannot say their creed? 

I know not what I think; I know 
Only that Thou art what I need.'* 

His poetry sums up his life, and is a treasury 
of beauty and of melody. Lines which Gilder 
wrote in memory of another equally befit his 
going : 

"When fell, to-day, the word that he had gone; 
Not this my thought: Here a bright journey ends, 
Here rests a soul unresting; here at last, 
Here ends that earnest strength, that generous life — 
For all his life was giving. Rather this 
I said (after the first swift, sorrowing pang): 
Radiant with love, and love's unending power, 
Hence, on a new quest, starts an eager spirit — 
No dread, no doubt, unhesitating forth 
With asking eyes, pure as the bodiless souls 
Whom poets vision near the central throne 
Angelically ministrant to man, 
So fares he forth with smiling Godward face; 
Nor should we grieve, but give eternal thanks — 
Save that we mortal are and needs must mourn.'* 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 

The woods in this case is the "Jersey Pines'^ ; 
the inn, the "Pine Tree" at Lakehurst; but the 
woods and the inn, as used in this writing, are 
typical. This is not an advertisement of "the 
Pines" or of anything else — any more than it is a 
syllogism or a symphony, a table of logarithms 
or a conundrum ; it is simply a discursive medi- 
tation, an impromptu, inspired by the woods and 
the inn. 

"The Pines" is a vast tract of coniferous coun- 
try in southern New Jersey, extending from the 
Atlantic Ocean to Delaware Bay, containing 
some hundreds of thousands of acres of pine 
mixed with oak, concerning which the State Geo- 
logical Reports says : "The soil is dry, sandy, and 
absorbent, which, together with the aromatic 
breath of the pines, makes the region remark- 
ably healthful." In the heart of that region this 
meditation was jotted down. 

"This is the forest primeval" ; for not since the 
region rose out of the sea and vegetation first 
grew has this tract been other than a wilderness, 
and so far are modern forestry and silviculture 
from touching it that one doubts if even Mr. 
Pinchot has ever heard of it. This might pass 
as that "vast wilderness," that "boundless con- 

217 



218 THE OPEN FIRE 

tiguity of shade'^ for which the poet yearned ; for 
its extent is such that the most ambitious pedes- 
trian can walk as many miles in one direction as 
he cares to day after day without getting out of 
the wilderness region, but not enough to satisfy a 
certain public librarian, a slight little woman 
with gray hair, keen eyes, and a quick step, who 
said, "My idea of heaven is a forest where I can 
walk a thousand years, with a botany under one 
arm and a Dante under the other, and only peo- 
ple of my own choosing for company." 

The manifold variety and charm of winter 
woods are unsuspected by those who do not visit 
them, and who probably imagine them to be a 
withered, dreary, uninviting waste; whereas 
their chaste and austere beauty is full of fascina- 
tion and refreshment for those who yield to their 
appeal. Enough there is, even in winter, to make 
strong the lure of wagon roads and footpaths 
through the woods. Nothing less than a bit of 
nature's elegance is one of these tempting wood- 
land paths, paved with clean, white sand which 
was once sea-bottom ; paths silkily carpeted with 
pine-needles; paths margined with tufted and 
quilted mosses, mottled in grays and greens and 
darker hues, daintily embroidered and filigreed 
with delicate vines; paths hedged by wild shrub- 
bery and thickets and the limitless arabesquery 
of the untamed wilderness. 

These winter paths offer inducements quite as 
enriching, if not as numerous, as those of bar- 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 219 

gain counters in department stores. As health 
resorts thej outrank stores, courtrooms and of- 
fices, parlors and lecture rooms, libraries and lab- 
oratories. Along their well ventilated aisles who- 
ever goes out to "eat the air," as natives of India 
phrase it, finds that it tastes good : it has what 
Cable calls "the sweet, dry smell of salubrity"; 
and in these woods electricity and oxygen gener- 
ate ozone — a tonic which tastes better than al- 
coholic and narcotic nostrums, and which 
"addeth no sorrow therewith." 

Added to the hope of physical renovation to be 
found upon these paths, a promise of mental in- 
vigoration is definitely held out. A man who, 
by dint of sedulous industry, had acquired some 
of the brain-fag which caused Thackeray to write, 
"I have taken too many crops off the soil," 
chanced to read in a book on The Religion of 
Nature about "the mental strength that comes to 
those who make a comrade of Nature"; and at 
once he was moved by a feeling of personal des- 
titution to go several miles into the woods to get 
some mental strength by coaxing Nature to be 
his comrade for a while. He got at least benefit 
enough to make him want to go again. 

Only infants, valetudinarians, the aged, the 
"powerful weak," the indolent, the preoccupied, 
and a few others are insensible to the enticements 
of woodland paths. A noble, wholesome, and in- 
spiriting sight it was to see in rapid motion 
through the Lakehurst woods one glittering 



220 THE OPEN FIRE 

white day the tall, slender, erect figure of a 
youthful superoctogenarian judge, swinging his 
long limbs in a loping stride, mile after mile, in 
the bracing winter air, pushing his fine, keen face 
against the north wind, his cheeks touched with 
the ruddy glow of outdoor exercise — a spectacle 
well calculated by contrast to console one for 
having had to behold on city promenades some 
very different pedestrian feats, such, for example, 
as the saunter of the fatted prodigal, or prodigal 
calf, who totes his precious body along the pave- 
ment for the solemn and sublime purpose of giv- 
ing his walking-stick an airing; or the perilous 
navigating of the billowy sidewalk by a gifted 
lawyer, coming down the street with his sea legs 
on, lurching alternately to larboard and star- 
board, with feet widespread, trying hard to pre- 
vent the tumultuous sidewalk from coming on 
board over his bow or his quarter, making one 
think of Robert Hall's vision of Satan, "The 
pavement heaved under him like the billows of the 
sea and he looked like majesty in ruins — majesty 
in ruins" ; or the zigzagging of the doggy woman 
who makes a "bloomin' show" of herself as she 
plays the part of Lady in Waiting to his im- 
perial dogship, attending him from station to 
station of his all too public pilgrimage along the 
avenue. A Washington Chief Justice remarked 
to his friend as they were passing such a sight, 
"When I see that, I always feel sorry for the dog 
that has to keep such company." By contrast, 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 221 

the sight of a venerated nonogenarian judge — the 
embodiment of sense, dignity, and soundness of 
body, mind, and soul — vigorously afoot along the 
winter woodland roads, is an exhilarating and 
inspiring spectacle. 

The winter wind is searching and antiseptic. 
It blows cobwebs from the brain and microbes 
from the garments. It goes through one's 
clothes like a customs inspector, and causes 
one man to remember a day when he went to 
a tenement house on call to baptize a dying 
babe in a room containing three other sick chil- 
dren. Asking the father, who held one child in 
his arms, what ailed them all, he received the 
grinning, lightheaded, if not really delirious re- 
ply, ^'Diptheery, worst kind." The man having 
decorously fulfilled his ministry in that pest- 
hole, shook his garments for a mile or two in the 
blustering winter wind to get surely rid of the 
bacilli diphthericB before he dared take himself to 
his own or any home. 

Only to the observant and attentive does Na- 
ture show her winter beauties, less obvious and 
obtrusive than those of summer. In most of us 
powers of observation lie inert or disused. Much 
pleasure is missed by failing to notice and attend. 
A middle-aged woman tells how, long ago, Harry 
Fenn, the artist, took a child sleigh-riding among 
the North Jersey hills and stopped to show her 
the wonder of the grasses, pointing out each lit- 
tle brown spear and seed cup which rose above 



222 THE OPEN FIRE 

the snow crust, and what a fine setting they made 
for the ice jewels, and what lovely blue shadow 
patterns they drew on the snow, and made the 
child notice how graceful and individual the 
naked trees were, each keeping its distinct char- 
acter and its personal dignity, though stripped 
of the glory of its foliage by the frosty adversities 
of winter; and showed her that the clean, deli- 
cate gray beauty of the naked trees is as affect- 
ing as the tender charm of their budding in 
spring or the flutter of their leafage in summer. 
The artist gave the child a lesson in the exquisite 
and minute beauty of this amazing world; and 
when the spirited pony hurried them home 
through the December twilight, sliaking his 
shaggy mane and jingling the sleigh bells mer- 
rily, the happy little girl felt that she had been 
to Wonderland. Across forty years the woman 
still sees those trees and grasses, and to that ride 
chiefly she attributes her interest ever since in 
winter landscapes. Of such a landscape it is as 
warrantable to say as of a popular grand opera 
in the words of a London paper, "It leaves the 
impression of true and treasurable beauty." 

In the rush of busy life an active man pays 
small attention to the beauties and transactions 
of earth and sky; seldom sees anything but his 
immediate objective from hour to hour. But 
when he drops out of the rush into some country 
region, especially if it be a region of hills and 
w oods and streams, for a few^ days of change and 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 223 

rest or secluded work, he must be pretty dull or 
weary or aged if there does not start up afresh in 
him the old boyish interest in the outdoor world. 
And this sudden and eager interest is attended 
often by a curious sense of partnership in Na- 
ture's ongoings. He even inclines to take charge 
of some of its processes, sharing the feeling 
George Meredith had when he wrote one Janu- 
ary from his chalet in the Surrey country : "I am 
every morning on the top of Box Hill. I drop 
down the moon on one side, I draw up the sun 
on t'other. I breathe fine air, I shout ha I ha ! to 
the gates of the world." After a long early-to- 
bed sleep, it may easily happen that he feels 
called to assist at the sunrise, to extend a help- 
ing hand to the inexperienced and bashful new 
day, which never saw this world before, as it 
climbs timidly up over the stile of the morning 
from the subhorizon underworld ; ten hours later 
he thinks it important that he go out and help 
the Evening Angels, brightly robed as Era An- 
gelico's, put the tired sun to bed in the gorgeous 
dormitory of the west, beyond where the serried 
cedars, palisading the skyline, screen his Ma- 
jesty's retirement; and sometimes the man lin- 
gers till the dusk deepens into dark to make sure 
before he goes indoors for the night that the even- 
ing star hangs its lantern in the right place and 
lights up at the proper moment. Here in the 
Jersey Pines he appoints himself Keeper of the 
Forests and Inspector of Roads, Bridges, and 



224 THE OPEN FIRE 

Waterways. Several times between sunup and 
sundown he is liable to think he must go out and 
superintend the woods ; must see that none of the 
pure-hearted, guileless little streams loses its 
way in its gentle journey to the lake; wants to 
lean over the railing of Black's Bridge and look 
down into the little river that comes gliding 
through the swamp and slides under the bridge, 
swaying in its clean, soft-flowing water, the wavy 
grasses dark and bright, and the trailing mosses 
and various long-haired water-plants, like a mov- 
ing multicolored tapestry, playing loose over its 
gravelly and sandy bottom. As if he were afraid 
lest some of the wood paths may not find their 
way to the Inn, but wander about all night, like 
lost Babes in the Woods, he goes out before night- 
fall to show them the way home. Altogether, 
he may lead quite a busy life supervising the 
woods and looking after Nature's affairs in gen- 
eral. 

Doubly dear and precious is every green thing 
in the depth of winter, -and in these winter woods, 
when the ground is not snow-covered, one is as 
much delighted as surprised at the amount of 
evergreenness, not only in the pines overhead, but 
also in the ground growth of thickets, shrubs, 
vines, mosses, and even grasses, continuing in 
spite of biting frosts a summer-in-winter on the 
bosom of the earth as if the forest were a shel- 
tering conservatory. It is a brave little spectacle 
to see how successfully the wintergreen lives up 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 225 

to its name, by the mile, along Checkerberry 
Koad, alike under the snow as under the sun, the 
long winter through. Jeweled with consistency 
would our records as Christians be if we but 
lived up perennially to the sacred and inspiring 
Name we bear as loyally and completely as this 
pleasant little oval-leafed, white-blossomed, red- 
berried plant fulfills in its lowly life the expecta- 
tion raised by its name. 

In open places in the heart of the woods in very 
sunny spots of sand are clumps of the opal cac- 
tus. It has invisible spines, sharp enough to 
pierce the skin, and stay there till they fester 
out. I ascertained this without the aid of a book. 
The cactus is an academic plant, second cousin 
to the thistle, with a Latin motto, Nemo me im- 
pune lacessit, same as Scotland's. 

Nothing is more wonderful in winter woods 
than the exquisite patterns and rich variety of 
kind and form and color in the family of mosses. 
One may find here, as easily as "half-way up an 
Alpine gorge, the fairy-cupped, elf-needled mat 
of moss." Chief among such displays are the 
peculiar small rounded or obloid mats or low 
mounds of moss found in boggy places, like em- 
bossed shields or embroidered cushions, from five 
to thirty inches in diameter, hassocking the 
spongy ground, and so Orientally rich in poly- 
chromatic beauty that they seem as if painted 
with ecru and burnt umber, stained with saffron 
and cedar wood, encrusted with topaz and gar- 



226 THE OPEN FIRE 

net, or carved from quarries of feldspar and al- 
bite and beryl. One man, amazed at such beauty 
in so rough a place, felt a momentary impulse to 
use one of these hassocks of moss for a kneeling 
cushion, to turn the marsh into an oratory, in 
mute adoration of the Divine Designer and Dec- 
orator whose lavish and matchless artistry does 
not disdain to adorn the lowliest spots in the 
forest's remotest recesses with embellishments 
fit for the palaces of kings. 

When the earth is snow-covered, the color 
scheme of this pine-oak wilderness is a symphony 
of white and green and brown; but when snow 
and ice are off, as is mostly the case, the variety 
of colors is larger, including many mottled mats 
and patches of multicolored moss; including, 
too, the bright crimson of the cranberries floating 
on the flooded bogs or drifting down the outlet 
streams; including also the dark purple of the 
oddest bit of vegetation in all the Jersey Pines — 
the Pitcher Plant, called also Huntsman's Cup, 
the Barracenia Purpurea of the North, a most 
singular plant found at the edge of streams or 
lakes, or in boggy acres, and sometimes encamped 
in clusters on one of the low mounds or mats of 
variegated moss just described. This queer little 
creature carries a water-pitcher and in the 
proper season holds over itself, alike in shade 
and shine, a tall dark purple flower, like a para- 
sol. It has these curious human pitcher-and- 
parasol ways because it is a distant relative of 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 227 

ours, belonging as it does to the order of carni- 
vora ; for it is insectivorous, catching, drowning, 
devouring, and digesting insects. Thus in its lit- 
tle wilderness this rudimentary swart Israelite 
of the marsh has its winged flesh-food and its 
drink as surely, and from the same Hand, as 
ancient Israel in its vast wilderness had quails 
from heaven and water from the Eent-Rock 
Spring. 

In this witched and witching world nobody has 
quite so wonderful a time of it as the poet with 
his miraculous faculty for seeing visions and 
dreaming dreams. The poet is a man so daft 
that he fancies he hears what he doesn't hear 
and thinks he sees what he doesn't see. In this 
the poet is a great child, as also the average 
child is something of a poet. Democritus barred 
poets from the slopes of Helicon as being prob- 
ably mad; and Edison would not include them in 
his Hall of Fame. Scientific gentlemen are apt 
to distrust and decry the poets as visionaries who 
contribute nothing to the mechanics of life — 
though, we respectfully suggest, it would be dif- 
ficult for the scientists to prove that the poets 
do not furnish life with motive power of a myste- 
riously if not miraculously mighty sort ; and the 
sort of motive power that energizes and moves a 
man must be reckoned superior in usefulness to 
the sort of motive power which merely moves en- 
gines and machinery made by the man. However 
hampered and oppressed or depressed a poet may 



228 THE OPEN FIRE 

feel amid the bustle and roar of city streets, when 
he takes to the woods he carries his temperament 
and imagination with him and lets them loose to 
revel ad libitum. 

One thing which impresses everybody in deep 
woods on windless days is that utter stillness 
which made a little boy lift his finger and say in 
a half whisper, "Hush, mother; listen to the si- 
lence." The poet finds this intense stillness 
sensitive and the silence almost vocal. To the 
prosaic mind Nature seems more incommunica- 
tive than did an overworked, broken down 
teacher pacing her room in the insane asylum, 
day after day, with arms behind her, in rigid 
reticence, refusing for long periods to utter a 
single word. When a friendly visitor asked 
gently and appealingly, "Why won't you talk?" 
she answered, "Because I have nothing to say." 
The visitor's laughing reply, "Well, if the rest of 
us waited till we really had something to say, 
probably we would keep still too," brought to the 
pale, refined face a faint smile — the first in many 
months. Nature too is a silent teacher. Lo- 
quacity is not one of her foibles. Her reticence 
seems to the natural man invariable. To most of 
us she never makes any definite or recordable 
remarks. A stenographer, sitting down in the 
woods to interview Nature, would turn into stone 
and be buried under the deposits of ages, and be 
dug up as a geologic fossil, before he would get 
one authentic sentence on his writing pad from 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 229 

Nature's lips. The look on her face is as inscru- 
table as the sphinx's stony stare or Mona Lisa's 
smile. Yet the poet and the mystic insist that 
her look is not meaningless ; that she has some- 
thing on her mind which she wants us to read. 
A keen and brilliant book, now lying open before 
us, says that the work of philosophy is to enforce 
the attitude of meditation, and that we do not 
really experience any object until, like the poet, 
we fade away with it into the silent forest, far 
from the strife of tongues ; and the book empha- 
sizes the value of the state of mind which prefers 
to attend rather than to speak, and which listens 
with great and ever-changing emotions to the 
deep voice of the world. Nature, according to 
the ancient Plotinus, is saying to us in her word- 
less way, "Understand in silence, even as I am 
silent" ; and a modern Plotinus told us only yes- 
terday that ^^Ultimate truth is got only in the 
absence of words" — from which a relentlessly 
logical mind might infer that in the stillness of 
woodland paths we may be on the track of ulti- 
mate truth. Notice that both of these Plotinuses 
treat us as mystics; and mystics, confessed or 
unconfessed, we verily are. We all have the mys- 
tic ichor in our blood, and were conscious of hav- 
ing a super sense exceeding our five physical 
senses before Bishop Brent wrote his book on The 
Sixth Sense. Why not a sixth sense for us as 
credibly as a fourth dimension for space? Mathe- 
matics sometimes assumes five, six, or more di- 



230 THE OPEN FIRE 

mensions ; and is mere space more affluent, volu- 
minous, and extensive than a living expansive 
man? And if the sixth sense is strong and alert 
enough, one may share in the woods that mys- 
tical expectancy which quivers in the soul of the 
poet, nestling close to Nature^s heart and wait- 
ing for her to make a confidant of him : 

"The silence grows 
To that degree, you half believe 

It must get rid of what it knows; 
Its bosom does so heave." 

To a poet with his sixth and seventh senses at 

their keenest 

"The Silence sings 
Like a vast rumor of unheard-of things." 

Even William Winter, in his poem "The Voice 
of the Silence," intimates that the tranquillity 
of Nature in peaceful silent places breathes ad- 
monitions, and that there is some subtle spiritual 
import in, and impartment from, the quiescence 
of the physical world. 

Sometimes the silence of the forest's deep re- 
cesses casts over us the solemn mood which in- 
spired George Meredith's magical "Dirge in 
Woods" : 

"A wind sways the pines 

And below 
Not a breath of wild air; 
Still as the mosses that glow 
On the flooring and over the lines 
Of the roots here and there. 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 231 

The pine tree drops its dead; 
They are quiet as under the sea. 
Over head, overhead 
Rushes life in a race, 
As the clouds the clouds chase; 

And we go, 
And we drop like the fruits of the tree, 
Even we. 
Even so." 



In the heart of the Jersey Pines the sense of 
utter solitude matches the utter silence of the 
stillest days. The comparative absence of life 
surprises one: seldom sight of hunter or sound 
of gun or baying hound; or sight of rabbit or 
rabbit- tracks ; or sight or sound of any bird; no 
whirr of wings nor drumming partridge: now 
and then quail or crows on the ground or in the 
trees or in the sky; but often the only living 
sound is the wee little, sweet little "weet, weet, 
weef of a wee little bunch of feathers flitting 
about in the branchy thickets. A man who 
transfers himself from the hurly-burly of strenu- 
ous, struggling, strident life into the forest, 
easily understands what Janus of Basel meant 
by "the woodland peace.'' The more complete the 
solitude the better; he finds it so poulticing 
and comforting, after the bruising rush and crush 
of crowds, that he pictures how lovely it would 
be to build a cozy bungalow far away in the 
woods and fondly name it "Lonesomehurst" in 
testimony to the sweetness of solitude, which, 
however, is said by some amiable and experienced 



232 THE OPEN FIRE 

persons to be sweeter if you have some one to 
share it who agrees that it is sweet. 

"What place is that?'^ asked a passenger on a 
Potomac River steamboat of one of the boat- 
hands. "That's A a, the deadest and God- 

forsakenest place in America." But, strange as 
it may seem, no one ever feels the woods to be a 
dead and God-forsaken place. The solitude seems 
mysteriously, but stirringly, alive with some- 
thing going on. Perhaps Professor Gummere 
could detect the goings on of a communal life 
among the trees of the forest. Who has not heard 
the leaves whispering together, some of them 
making a noise like excited little gossips telling 
the neighborhood scandal to every passing breeze, 
w^hile the dry oak-leaves have rattling alterca- 
tions with rougher winds that go blustering by. 
Even the uninitiated suspect that Nature is con- 
ducting secret Masonic rites in Forest Lodge, or 
feel themselves to be assisting in some sacred 
ritual of silence. A dim sense of invisible pres- 
ences is among primitive instincts and intuitions 
which have w^orked fruitfully in human history, 
as when elaborate ancient polytheistic mytholo- 
gies populated the woods with dryads, fauns, and 
nymphs. Even in this arc-lighted age an unim- 
aginative and properly skeptical tw^entieth-cen- 
tury man, duly puffed up with his consciousness 
of modernity, when he turns a corner on the 
woodland path and comes upon a mossy, viny, 
ferny, nooky spot just fit for elves and fairies, 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 233 

becomes a melting mystic and instinctively feels 
that the most natural way of explaining their 
absence is by the theory that his approaching 
footsteps startled their tiny shynesses, so that he 
barely missed a fluttering which he might have 
heard and a scurrying which he failed to see. He 
reckons this as one of the near-happenings, the 
almost-not-quites of life, with which our actual 
experience is forever bordered. And why are 
not the soft cushions of pixy moss in that se- 
cluded nook proof positive that the pixies resort 
there, as surely as an empty bird's nest implies 
the bird or a vacant cradle the babe? And why 
is that green velvet rug in the middle of the nook, 
if not for fairies to frolic on? 

But our subtle human intuitions go beyond 
fanciful suspecting of invisible wild woodland 
creatures, and the duly reverent, serious soul of 
man soberly surmises some superhuman pres- 
ence, even the presence of Him who filleth all in 
all. The old Greek wondered if under majestic 
trees he might not overhear the councils of the 
gods and gain oracular wisdom by listening for 
the voice of Zeus in the rustle of Dodonian oaks. 
But the great god Pan is dead and the oracles of 
the groves are no longer pagan. Jonathan Ed- 
wards said : "The beauties of Nature are really 
emanations or shadows of the excellency of the 
face of God" — the Christian God. That great 
nature-lover and man-lover Charles Kingsley 
said that wherever he had a sense of mystery 



234 THE OPEN FIRE 

surrounding him in Nature he felt a gush of en- 
thusiasm toward God — the God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ, Father of mercies and 
God of all comfort. To the devout Lanier there 
came, in the woods, his vivid Ballad of Trees and 
the Master. Since the Divine Man went in and 
out of groves and prayed all night in them, and 
in under their branches had his agony and bloody 
sweat, the forest is not pagan any more. One 
man, wandering in the winter woods and look- 
ing afar between the tree-trunks across stretches 
of spotless snow, recalled the experience Brown- 
ing narrates, when leaving the little Roman 
chapel on Christmas Eve, the man suddenly saw, 
"on the narrow pathway just before,'^ the Divine 
Master — "He himself with his human air; saw 
the back of him — no more; no face: only the 
sight of a sweepy garment, vast and white, with 
a hem that could be recognized." And the man's 
pulses leaped for joy because on the common 
street he had caught sight of Christ's vesture's 
hem — with no more cause, mark you, for think- 
ing of Christ on a street in Rome than you and 
I have when we see through the dark pines the 
wide spread of snow like "a sweepy garment 
vast and white" with a hem that your soul and 
mine touch and get virtue out of Him and heal- 
ing from the seamless dress. The very least that 
any woodland visitor, who ever thinks of Christ 
at all, can do is to say to his soul on entering, 
"Into the woods my Master went," and on emerg- 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 235 

ing, "Out of the woods my Master came." Nature 
points to some One greater, seeming to say : "Lo, 
there cometh One the latchet of whose shoes I am 
not worthy to unloose.'' 

All forest roads should lead to some place of 
shelter and rest. Some that run through the 
Jersey wilderness find their way to Lakehurst 
and the Pine Tree Inn at the edge of the little 
village. The pines bring their ranks up to its 
west end and stand looking in at its dining-room 
windows; and most of the woodland paths lead 
to its friendly front door, which says : 

"Now lift my latch and readily I swing 
To bid thee come where courtesy is king." 

The atmosphere of Mother Mary Baker Glover 
Eddy's meditation halls is not serener or sun- 
nier than the interior of this Inn, nor a culti- 
vated home more refined and gracious. The 
words of one guest express the feeling of all, 
"The whole place spells K-e-s-t." The pine-cones 
pictured on the cover of its booklet are em- 
blematically suitable to the Inn, both outdoors 
and indoors; for outside the trees are loaded with 
the cones and inside a Pine Knot is not unfit 
motto-emblem for the Pine Not, Don't Worry 
Club which the guests virtually constitute, since 
the lines are fallen unto them in pleasant places. 
Here Mine Host thinks an altar more respect- 
able than a barroom, and so substitutes the better 
for the worse. Over the round-arched fire-place 



236 THE OPEN FIRE 

in the Inn's central hall, on the chimney-piece, 
are lettered the words of an old hymn : "Around 
our habitation be Thou a wall of light." That 
inscription is enough to insure that one will not 
meet here the flashy, the trashy, or the unrefined. 
In a world like this such a house is a splendid 
moral venture, and its prosperity demonstrates 
in public sight, like a geometric proposition on 
the blackboard, that Wisdom can take care of 
her children and that the Power that makes for 
Righteousness is able to fulfill the promise given 
to godliness for both worlds. 

The inn is one of the most venerable of human 
institutions. Away back in Genesis, in the morn- 
ing of history, Joseph's brethren stopped at an 
inn and fed their asses when they were 
down in Egypt buying corn. And the man 
who fell among thieves, and was stripped and 
beaten and robbed and left half dead, had reason 
to be glad that there was an inn on the old 
Jericho road to which the good Samaritan could 
take him for shelter and care. 

An inn is a sign of civilization, serving a gen- 
eral need, and, first or last, having a place in 
almost everybody's experience. It is the trav- 
eler's refuge; it stands by the side of the road, 
for the needs of the physical man, for temporary 
rest and shelter, with food and drink. It has 
been suggested that the quality of any country's 
inns is a fair indication of its advancement in 
civilization. Boswell tells us how Dr. Sam John- 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 237 

son, stopping at a comfortable inn, spoke of it as 
a token and measure of national civilization, and 
expatiated on the felicity of England in having 
such excellent houses for travelers, exulting over 
Britain's superiority above the French in this 
respect. And then went on : "There is no private 
house in which guests can enjoy themselves so 
freely as in a capital inn. Though there be ever 
so great plenty of good things, ever so much 
grandeur and elegance, ever so much desire to 
make the guest feel easy; in the very nature of 
the case it cannot be.: there must always be for 
both host and guest some degree of anxiety and 
constraint. The guest feels bound to make his 
best effort to be agreeable; and no man, unless 
he be a very impudent dog, can attempt to com- 
mand what is in another man's house as freely 
as if it were his own. Whereas, at an inn there 
is general freedom from anxiety and constraint. 
The guest is sure he is wanted, and the more 
trouble he gives, the more good things he calls 
for, the welcomer he is.'' And then (says Bos- 
well) the gruff old Samuel repeated with emotion 
Shenstone's lines : 

"Whoe'er has traveled life's dull road, 
Where'er his stages may have been, 
Can testify he oft has found 
His warmest welcome at an inn." 

He knows the welcome there is genuine and cor- 
dial, every look and motion of Boniface saying 



238 THE OPEN FIRE 

sincerely, "All that I have is thine'' ("for a rea- 
sonable price, of course," tacitly understood). 
That many should prefer to be at an inn, where 
they are wanted, rather than in some home where 
they are not sure of being wanted, is not sur- 
prising, but looks like a fine blending of good 
sense and self-respect. 

The inn has been used by some as a quiet re- 
treat for uninterrupted writing or study, an es- 
cape from rush and roar and jostle in a peaceful 
seclusion where one feels no more the stir of the 
great Babel nor even hears afar its noise. Pro- 
fessor C. T. Winchester tells us how William 
Hazlitt, the delightful English essayist, when 
vexed by society or craving solitude for work, 
used to flee for refuge to a lonely wayside inn on 
the edge of the heath a mile out from the village 
of Winterslow, near Salisbury, and that his best 
writing was done there. 

Inns have a notable place in literature and in 
recorded history as in life; Fielding and Smol- 
lett and Sterne, Cervantes and Walter Scott and 
Le Sage, Thackeray's "Roundabout Papers," and 
Dickens' stories — all full of talk about inns ; an.d 
many famous hostelries are told about, quaint or 
ancient, or noted as resorts and rendezvous of 
numerous celebrities, boon companions and con- 
genial spirits. England and English literature 
are interesting and picturesque with many such. 
We remember the old "Black Bull" in Edinburgh 
where Coleridge had the nightmare and dreamed 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 239 

he was dying and composed in his sleep this 
epitaph : 

"Here sleeps at length poor Col. and without screaming 
Who died, as he had always lived, a dreaming; 
Shot dead, while sleeping, by the gout within. 
Alone, and all unknown, at E'nbro' in an Inn," 

Someone has made a book of descriptions of curi- 
o-us old tavern signs. Even America can furnish 
some. Tradition has it that in front of the old 
Red Lion Inn at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, the 
winds of long ago used to swing a sign which 
bore the picture of a bright red lion with a bright 
green tail. That was before there was any such 
functionary as Brander of Nature-Fakers. 

The name given to an inn, like the title given 
to a book, may be matter of interest and import- 
ance, and attract by its striking oddness or felici- 
tous aptness. What more fit and suggestive than 
"Windwhistle Inn,'' an old Wessex hostelry, sit- 
uated on the crest of a hill where the road went 
over the ridge and all the winds of heaven had 
full sweep, so that August sometimes howled like 
November; or "Night's Best Inn," on the old 
English post road, where the stage coach stopped 
at sunset, and the tired horses were unhitched 
and stabled for the night, and the passengers 
rested until morning; or Albert A. Leroy's goodly 
"Pine Tree Inn," set in the midst of the Jersey 
Pines? •^ 

Every traveler knows the comfort there is in 



240 THE OPEN FIRE 

having a good inn to look forw ard to at the end 
of one's journey. The chord of a common and 
familiar, but not trivial, experience is struck by 
a Wessex poet in his lines : 

"Having beaten afoot the northward way 
Throughout the hours of the livelong day, 
As the sun drew down to the west 
We climbed the toilsome Polden crest 
And saw, of landscape sights the best, 
The inn that gleamed thereby. 
Then Polden top at last we won 
And gained the inn at sink of sun, 
Far-famed as 'Marshal's Elm.' " 

Most of us can imagine how those jaded pedes- 
trians felt when they sank on the settle by the 
hearth, with the slant rays of the setting sun 
signaling through the west window that the long, 
hard day was done and realized how good it is 
to find shelter and fire and food at journey's end 
and a bed at weary sleep-time. Even the robust 
and healthy walker who exults with himself, "So 
many thousand buffets have mine own two feet 
given the resisting soil 'twixt sun and sun,'' is 
glad enough to find at the day's end some pleas- 
ant hostelry with all needed provisions for his 
comfort. And most of us know how interesting- 
it is to sit within, snugly sheltered in the glowing 
comfort of the inn, watch the new arrivals, and 
note the glad faces of travelers through mud and 
drenching rain as they come dripping in to dry 
themselves before the landlord's fire, or out of a 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 241 

blizzard come stamping in, snow-covered, from 
the tussle with blustering elements. 

In many a human life the roads are sometimes 
rough and steep, and there is many a man to 
whom, as he tramps the long, slow miles, perhaps 
with some heavy pack on his back, the prospect 
of an open door and an unfeigned welcome at the 
end of that journey and a chance to halt and lie 
down and sleep and forget is the best hope he 
then has in all this mortal life; there is many 
a soldier on the march so exhausted that knap- 
sack and musket are a burden, and then all his 
longing is centered on the time and place of 
camping for the night; possessed by that one 
thought and craving, he forgets the past and 
recks not of the morrow. Even to men as woeful, 
forlorn, dejected, and preoccupied as a certain 
historic two who footed it over the hills on the 
Emmaus road, spent from some awful days and 
nights of horror and anguish, it was doubtless 
some small comfort to look forward to finding a 
night's rest at Emmaus far from the cruel city 
when it should be toward evening and the day far 
spent : for nothing is more exhausting than heart- 
breaking sorrow, tragic and ghastly calamity, 
and unutterable grief, for which there is some- 
times no immediate earthly relief but in sleeping 
and, for a time, forgetting. There may be night- 
falls and journey endings when, to poor, weak, 
worn human nature, the dearest of all Scripture 
will seem "He giveth his beloved sleep.'' After 



242 THE OPEN FIRE 

"the wine of astonishment," and the vinegar, 
wormwood, and gall, a drink of some sirup that 
can minister slumber is welcome to the lips. And 
heaven often does its best for bitter thoughts and 
intolerable sorrow when it sends weariness and 
night to administer the blessed anodyne of uncon- 
sciousness. Poor Alfred de Musset, disillusioned 
and heart-sick, worn out with the sordid tragedy 
of his Epicurean life, murmured thankfully at 
the wretched end of his gay career, "At last I am 
going to sleep." 

Whether on foot, on horseback, or in coaches, 
we are all on a journey over the same road; we 
are but passing travelers who will not come this 
way again, who will presently go out of sight 
beyond the Great Divida In the long hereafter 
all the annals of human history will seem but 
tales of a wayside inn ; for this old earth is only 
an Inn, a temporary lodging-place, and we are 
"transients" in the Hotel of the World. Our 
psalm in this house of our pilgrimage is the 
hymn: 

"I'm a pilgrim and I'm a stranger; 
I can tarry, I can tarry but a night." 

As one cheerful vagabond says, "We are but 
lodgers for a night in this old Wayside Inn of 
Earth; to-morrow we shall take our pack and 
set out for the ways beyond, on the old trail from 
star to star." Happy we if our path beyond be 
among the stars, and our journey end in the city 



THE WOODS AND THE INN 243 

of Many Mansions. Well for us now if we take 
the New Year's advice of Dr. George Clarke Peck 
to his flock to "greet each new day with a cheer, 
looking to the Father's House at the end of the 
road." 



SOME NEWSPAPER VERSE 

Before us lies a book of verse entitled Canzoni, 
by T. A. Daly. It is a book of gathered-up news- 
paper poetry not up to magazine grade, most, if 
not all, of it printed first in newspapers, as was 
also, we believe, much of Whitcomb Riley's 
poetry, which has had very large and, we are told, 
very lucrative sale. Poor John Milton, it is said, 
got twenty-five dollars for his immortal Paradise 
Lost, read now by how many of Riley's and Daly's 
readers, we wonder? This little book has sold 
many thousauds. And subsequent volumes like 
it kept coming, until every day a new poem by 
Daly appeared in some newspaper, so that we 
had to spell his name "Daily." Most of his verses 
are in some dialect^ a few in Irish, fewer in Ne- 
gro, and the most in Italian, of which last Mr. 
Daly has nearly a monopoly, so far as we know. 
One may here see what newspapers judge that 
the everyday man dearly loves to read. The 
home-sickness of the Irishman finds sure and 
sweet expression in this "Song of the Thrush" : 

"Ah, the May was grand this mornin'! 
Shure, how could I feel forlorn in 
Such a land, when tree and flowers tossed their kisses 
to the breeze? 

244 



SOME NEWSPAPER VERSE 245 

Could an Irish heart be quiet 
While the spring was runnln' riot, 

An* the birds of free America were singin' in the trees? 
In the songs that they were singin' 
No familiar note was ringin', 

But I strove to imitate them an' I whistled like a lad. 
O, my heart was warm to love them 
For the very newness of them — 

For the ould songs that they helped me to forget — an' 
I was glad. 

"So I mocked the feathered choir 
To my hungry heart's desire, 
An' I gloried in the comradeship that made their joy 
my own. 
Till a new note sounded, stillin' 
All the rest. A thrush was trillin'! 
Ah! the thrush I left behind me in the fields about 
Athlone! 
Where, upon the whitethorn swayin'. 
He was minstrel of the Mayin', 
In my days of love and laughter that the years have 
laid at rest; 
Here again the notes were ringin'! 
But I'd lost the heart for singin' — 
Ah! the song I could not answer was the one I knew 
the best." 

These verses on "The Butt of the Loafers" ap- 
peared in the newspapers: 

"O! they needn't be so sly. 
All them lads when I pass by, 
Wid their winkin' o' the eye 

An' their jokin' an' all that. 
Sure, I'm wise enough to see 
That the cause of all their glee 
Is the ancient cut o' me 

An' me ould high hat. 



246 THE OPEN FIRE 

"Yerra! boys will have their play, 
So I've not a word to say — 
'Tis mesel' that wanst was gay 

As the gayest wan o' you; 
An' there wasn't manny men 
That'd care to joke me then, 
When me blood was warm an' when 

This ould hat was new. 

"It was wid me an' me bride 
When the blessid knot was tied, 
An' it follied, when she died, 

Where they soon will lay me, too. 
It has served me all these years, 
Shared me pleasures an' me tears — 
As it's sharin' now the jeers 

O' the likes o' you! 

"Now, ould hat, we're worn an* sick. 
But 'tis joy to think, avic. 
That you never held a brick — 

An' there's some that can't say that! 
So they needn't be so sly 
Wid their winkin' o' the eye 
When they see us passin' by. 

You an' me, ould hat!" 

Daly might almost be called the Laureate of Lit- 
tle Italy, in which office his dialect verses are de- 
lightful. No one can help liking "An Italian 



King" : 



"I am so good for evratheeng 
I oughta be electa Keeng! 
Ees no som'body else at all 
So strong like me, so beeg, so tall, 
An' no som'body else can do 
So greata theengs like I can, too. 



SOME NEWSPAPER VERSE 247 

How mooch you try you no can be 
So fina beega man like me. 
You bat my life! I oughta gat 
A crown for wear eenside my hat. 
An' makin* all da style I can, 
Baycause I am so granda man. 
All dees ees true. Eh? how I know? 
My leetla boy he tal me so. 

"You maka fun weeth me an' tease, 
An' call me 'Dago' eef you please ; 
An' mebbe so I what you call 
'No good for anytheeng at all.' 
An' you weell theenk you speaka true 
Baycause eet looka so to you. 
Wal, mebbe som'time you are right, 
But not w'en I gat home at night. 
Ha! dat'sa time dat I am Keeng 
An' I am good for evratheeng! 
I know; baycause Patricio, 
My leetla boy, he tal me so." 

Little Italy's frugal life is seen in Joe D'Annun- 
zio's "Change of Diet" : 

"Yestaday, w'en da wheestle blow noon, 

Joe D'Annunzio lay down hees spade, 
An' he's feedin' heemsal' pretta soon 

From hees deenner-pail here een da shade. 
W'en da 'Merican boss ees com' by 

From dat eatin' house over da way, 
'Deesa costa da food ees so high 

Eet ees keep a man busted,' he say. 
'Eet ees verra small lunch dat I eat — 

Som' roas' beef an' potato an' pie 
An' a leetla bit sauce for my meat — 

But eet's costa me seventy-fi'. 
An' I don'ta see how you can pay 

For da fooda dat keep you so fat.' 
*0! I make fine deenner,' Joe say, 

'Weeth da onion an* bread an* tomat'.* 



248 THE OPEN FIRE 

"An' to-day w'en da wheestle blow noon 

Here's D'Annunzio eatin' som' more; 
Comes da 'Merican boss pretta soon 

An' he mak' da keeck like bayfore. 
'Som' potato an' cabbage an' ham, 

An' som' cream an' som' peaches,' he say, 
'Dat ees all dat I eat, but, by dam, 

Eet ees costa me ninety to-day! 
An' you're eatin' da bread an' tomat' 

Lika yestaday. My! eet ees strange; 
Don't you newa gat tire' of dat 

An' try deeferent food for a change?' 
'Sure! da yestaday's deenner,' Joe say, 

'Was tomat', bread, an' onion for me. 
But eet's deeferant now, for to-day 

I ain't eatin' no onion, you see.' 

Here is one merchant who reports that business 
is looking up, and sings this song of "Pros- 
perity'^ : 

"Who say dat beezzanes ees blue 
An' times ees hard? Eet ees no true. 
You bat my life! I newa see 
Sooch trade like now ees com' to me. 
Ah! lees'en, an' I tal to you. 

"Las' fall w'en first I com', my frand. 
For keep dees small peanutta stand, 
Eet was too playnta beega 'nough 
Baycause I sal so leetle stuff. 
But now so many com' for buy 
Banan', peanutta, cak' an' pie, 
I soon mus' gat, I am afraid. 
Fine beega store for serve my trade. 
Den mebbe, too, I gona see 
To sal da coffee, milk, an' tea 
For customer dat aska me. 
You be su'prise' for see how fine 
Ees all dese customers of mine, 



SOME NEWSPAPER VERSE 249 

An* so polite dey «at deir food, 
An' look so nice, an* talk so good. 
O! dere ees wan, so beeg, so tall, 
He ees da grandes' wan of all! 
An' w'en he eat hees pie, my frand. 
An' I am watch heem go an' stand 
Een doorway of dat beeg hotal 
On Broadway, dat ees so swal. 
An' se heem peeck hees teeth an' smile 
An' bow een soocha granda style 
To all hees frands dat passa by, 
I am so proud I like to die! 

"Eef times ees hard you s'spose I gat 
So fina, beega trade like dat? 
From all dat I am tal to you 
Can dees 'bad beez'ness' talk be true? 

Eh! w'at? 

I bat you, not!" 

New Yorkers, just now, can listen feelingly to 
Angelo's account of his first "Lesson in City Poli- 
ties'' : 

"I no care for gattin' meex* 
Een dees ceety politeecs. 
I no gatta vote, an' so 
I no weeshin' mooch to know 
W'eech side right an* w'eech side wrong; 
I no bother mooch so long 
Dey no bother mooch weeth me — 
I Jus' want do beez'ness, see? 
I no like poleecaman 
Com' to dees peanutta-stan*, 
Like he do most evra day. 
Jus* for talka deesa way; 
'Wal, my fraud, I tal you w*at, 
Politeecs ees gattin' hot. 
Don't you mind all dessa queer 
Talka 'bout da "graft" you hear. 



250 THE OPEN FIRE 

Notheeng een eet!* (Here he tak' 
Bigga pieca geenger cak'.) 
'Dees "Reforma" mak' me seeck! 
Sucha foolish theengs dey speak! 

" 'All dees "graft" ees een deir eye.' 
(Now he taka pieca pie.) 
'I been een dees politeecs 
Seexa year an' know da treecks, 
But I tal you I ain't met 
Any kinda grafta yet.* 
(Here he taka two hanan*.) 
'Evra publeec office man 
Worka for a salary 
Jus' da sama lika me. 
We no want no more dan dat — 
Jus' contant weeth w'at we gat.* 
(Dent he tak' weeth hotha hand 
Som peanutta.) 'So, my fraud, 
Don't baylieva all dees queer 
Talka 'bouta "graft" you hear.* 

"Nutta, caka, pie, banan*. 
All for wan poleecaman! 
Mebbe ees no 'grafta' — ^say! 
Wat ees 'grafta', anyway?'* 

Delicious, indeed, is this story about Tony, the 
asthete, worshiper of the Beautiful, entitled 
^'The Blossomy Barrow" : 

"Antonio Sarto ees buildin* a wall, 
But maybe he nevva gon' feenish at all. 

Eet sure won'ta be 

Teell flower an' tree 
An' all kinda growin* theengs sleep een da fall. 

"You see, deesa 'Tonio always ees want' 
To leeve on a farm, so he buy wan las* jnont*. 



SOME NEWSPAPER VERSE 251 

I s'posa som' day eet be vera nice place, 

But shape dat he find eet een sure ees 'deesgrace'; 

Eet's busta so bad he must feexin* eet all, 

An' firs' theeng he start for build ees da wall. 

Mysal' I go outa for see heem wan day, 

An' dere I am catcha heem sweatin' away; 

He's liftin' beeg stones from all parts of hees land 

An' takin' dem up to da wall een hees hand! 

I say to heem: 'Tony, why don'ta you gat 

Som' leetla wheelbarrow for halp you weeth dat?' 

*0! com' an* I show you w'at's matter,' he said; 

An' so we go look at hees tools een da shed. 

Dere's fina beeg wheelbarrow dere on da floor. 

But w'at do you s'pose? From een under da door 

Som' mornin-glor' vines have creep eento da shed. 

An' beautiful flower, all purpla an' red. 

Smile out from da vina so pretty and green 

Dat tweest round da wheels an' da sides da machine. 

I look at dees Tony an' say to heem: 'Wal?' 

An' Tony he look back at me an' say 'Hal! 

I no can bust up soocha beautiful theeng; 

I work weeth my ban's eef eet tak' me teell spreeng!' 

"Antonia Sarto ees buildin' a wall. 
But maybe he nevva gon' feenish at all. 

Eet sure won'ta be 

Teell flower an' tree 
An' all kinda growin' theengs sleep een da fall." 

Here is the dialect of the East Side City Kid 
giving his opinion of "The Country- Week Kid" : 

"Say, all de kids is purty slick 

W'at runs aroun' our way. 
But dey ain't none kin shake a stick 

At little Patsy Shea. 
W'y, he kin pitch de 'in' an' 'out,' 

An' onct 'e trun a drop, 
An' he's de kin' youse read erbout 

Fur dodgin' frum a cop. 



252 THE OPEN FIRE 

An' w'en it comes ter jumpin' trains 

An' hoppin' off agen, 
Dere's where 'e shows 'e's got de brains 

Uv half er dozen men. 
An shootin' crap an' marbles — say 

He win an' never try; 
Dey ain't no flies on Patsy Shea, 

But, gee, how he kin lie! 

"Wy, say, youse knows de Country Week, 

Wat takes de poor kids out 
An* gives dem grub an' country air, 

An' lets dem run erbout? 
Well, dey're de people w'ats ter blame 

Fur all de lies we hear 
Since Patsy run ag'in deir game 

An' started actin' queer. 
Dey on'y had 'im out a week. 

But 'fore I'm t'rough dis pome 
I'll tell youse how he lied a streak 

As soon as he got home. 
*E tried ter bull uz kids; but, say, 

I guess we're purty fly, 
An' we jist laugh at Patsy Shea 

W'en 'e begins ter lie. 



"Foist lie 'e told wuz how *e went 

A-swimmin' in a creek. 
An* how nobody cared a cent 

If he had swimmed a week. 
Dey wuz'n' any cops, 'e sed, 

As fur as youse could see; 
An* dey wuz cherries, ripe an' red, 

A-growin' on a tree. 
An* youse could eat *em if youse please 

Till youse could eat no more. 
An' apples growed on udder trees 

Like w'at's in Clancey's store. 



SOME NEWSPAPER VERSE 253 

He told us all dese lies, *e did. 

An' never winked his eye — 
O! Patsy Shea's a clever kid. 

But, gee, how he kin lie!" 

But not all of Daly^s poems are in dialect. For 
example, these two on "The Old Parishioner'' 
and "The Building Inspector," both persons 
whom many ministers have met : 

"The graybeard glories in the past 

And prates of 'good old days.' 
These times are out of joint, he growls, 

And sneers at modem ways. 
He shakes his head at every move 

That's up-to-date and new. 
And everything you do is just 

The thing you shouldn't do. 
It's: 'Mercy save us! Look at that! 

We're slidin' back, I fear. 
The parish isn't what it was 

Whin Father Mack was here. 

** 'The weddin's now are not as fine 

As weddin's used to be. 
An', faith, they're not so numerous 
At all, at all,' says he. 

" 'Then, christ'nin's, too, were plentiful 

An' carried out wid style; 
'Twould warm your heart to seen them there 

A-crowdin' up the aisle. 
An' sermons! How the crowds would come 

To listen! Dear, O! dear. 
The parish isn't what it was 

Whin Father Mack was here." 

"Yet, from a study of the rolls 
And records, 'twould appear 
The parish claimed but fifty souls 
When Father Mack was here." 



254 THE OPEN FIRE 

And here is the well-known self-appointed super- 
visor of church erection : 

"When ground is broken on the site 
For your new church, some busy wight 
Is certain to assume the right 

To pose as chief inspector. 
He deems it quite the thing that he . 
Should represent the laity, 
And watch the builder's work and see 

He doesn't cheat the rector. 

"Of course the whole thing's badly planned, 
He tells you, and you understand 
How good it is that he's at hand 

To check some greater blunder. 
The mortar's bad. He breaks a crumb 
Between his finger and his thumb, 
And shakes his head and murmurs, 'Bum! 

Who sold 'em that, I wonder?' 

•'Thus after church each Sunday morn, 
With mingled pity, grief, and scorn, 
He goes about on his forlorn 

Grim duty of inspection. 
But, no, not every Sunday though — 
That statement's not exactly so — 
Some Sundays you take up, you know. 
The building fund collection." 

Tears and laughter are in Daly's verses. In 
"Dirty Little Fingers" he touches the same hu- 
man chord that sounds in Eugene Field's "Little 
Boy Blue" : 

"From the moment he could stand alone and toddle 
Across the bedroom floor from chair to chair. 
There was never any respite for his mother; 
He was getting into mischief everywhere. 



SOME NEWSPAPER VERSE 255 

There were somersaults distracting down the stairway. 

And tumbles off the sofa, to be sure, 
And the bumps he got were really quite terrific, 

But none a mother's kisses couldn't cure. 
He'd a most plebeian fondness for the kitchen. 

Whose precincts were his favorite retreat. 
And the coal-hod held for him a fascination. 

For he seemed to think it's contents good to eat. 
But the thing that caused his mother's greatest worry. 

And made her ply her house-cloth o'er and o'er. 
Was his subsequent invasion of the parlor 

With his grimy little fingers on the door. 

"How the whiteness of the paint was desecrated 

By those dirty little digits every day! 
Though his weary mother wept and begged and scolded. 

He pursued the even tenor of his way. 
It was evident that he was only happy 

When his fingers held their share and more of dirt, 
And the only thing he loathed was soap and water, 

And, O my, goodness gracious! how that hurt! 
But it hurts us now to contemplate the cleanness 

Of everything about this quiet place ; 
All the finger marks that used to mar the woodwork 

Have disappeared, nor left the slightest trace. 
For the last of them was wiped away last summer. 

Glad summer that is gone forevermore! 
We are lonely, Lord, and hungering to see him. 

With his grimy little fingers on the door." 

We began by calling T. A. Daly a newspaper 
poet; not in disparagement, be sure, but in char- 
acterization ; it may be to his praise. His verses 
are so close to the level of our common, everyday 
life that they can be caught on the fly as we run, 
so near to the primitive universals that they 
touch all sorts and conditions of men. Far be 
it from us to disparage newspaper poetry ! Some 



256 THE OPEN FIRE 

of it is worth watching for, and helps to redeem 
the page from sordidness and vulgarity and 
wickedness and filth. Did we not this very day 
light upon this pithy and far-reaching verse on 
Miracles all alone by its suggestive self in the 
bottom corner of the editorial page of our daily 
newspaper : 

"In order rolled each starry sphere, 
A babe was born, a raindrop fell. 
And yet he wearied heaven's ear 
By asking for a miracle." 

For this relief much thanks to McLandburgh 
Wilson, and for this other fine bit from the same 
source, "The Important Happening" : 

"An eagle strong 

His pinions spread 
And through the sky 
On conquest sped. 

"A joyful lark 

In wings elate 
Poured out his song 
At heaven's gate. 

"With lordly step 

From side to side 
A peacock spread 
His beauty wide. 

"An angel wrote 
His chronicle: 
•Behold, this day 
A sparrow fell!'" 

These verses set us at the feet of Jesus to learn 



SOME NEWSPAPER VERSE 257 

from him to be meek and lowly of heart, and to 
find rest unto our souls. 

A man who could touch the stars but often 
wallowed in the sty, wrote in one of his exalted 
moments "A blade of grass is no less than the 
journey-work of the stars; and the running black- 
berry would adorn the parlors of heaven; and a 
mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of 
infidels." 



CHRISTINA ROSSETTI'S DEVOTIONAL 
PROSE 

Even the most scholarly and learned may find 
refreshment, stimulus, and probably instruction 
in the religious meditations of intelligent and 
thoughtful saints who are not professed theolo- 
gians; and no small part of the value of Holy 
Scripture may consist in the meanings evoked 
therefrom by the spiritually minded and experi- 
enced who know not Greek or Hebrew, and who 
read the Bible, not critically, but absorbingly, 
with the insight of the pure in heart and for the 
good which a sincere and loving soul may find 
therein. 

Miss Rossetti was a godly as well as gifted 
woman who thought for herself and was deeply 
experienced up and down the octaves of the de- 
vout soul's possible life. All her force and feel- 
ing went with her intense religious convictions 
and firm faith in Christian doctrine. In her 
writings we perceive, not only the simplicity of a 
spirit too sincere to pretend, but the precision, 
directness, and soberness of a trained mind as 
well. Even the most mystical of her devotional 
prose and verse is kept wholesome by pervasive 
sanity and sound sense, exhibiting, not the un- 
clear and vaporish sentimentalizing of a weak 

258 



KOSSETTI^S DEVOTIONAL PROSE 259 

woman, but the steady step of a compact and 
capable intelligence along hallowed paths, and 
offering pregnant sayings, sensible homilies, 
cheerful exhortations, and wise disquisitions. 
Considering that she had the poetic tempera- 
ment, with both a genius and a passion for sym- 
bolism, and was naturally rather more apt at 
imaginative embellishment than at close reason- 
ing, it is remarkable that she should touch theo- 
logical themes with so much knowledge and dis- 
cretion. But this brilliant symbolist does not 
feel at liberty to indulge her propensity to sym- 
bolism simply for the sake of the pleasure which 
a fertile ingenuity finds in its own free exercise, 
and it is evident that she is restrained from tak- 
ing poetic liberties with precise Truth by the fear 
of the Lord and by conscientious reverence for 
the inviolable sanctity of his Word. Against un- 
warranted symbolism and excessive typology in 
our interpretations of Scripture we may all be 
warned by the words with which she admonishes 
herself : 

Symbolism affords a fascinating study; wholesome so long 
as it amounts to aspiration and research; unwholesome 
when it degenerates into a pastime. As literal shadows 
tend to soothe, lull, abate keenness of vision, so perhaps 
symbols may have a tendency to engross, satisfy, and arrest 
souls which are incautious, unwatchful, and unprayerful 
lest they enter into temptation. 

Nevertheless, without resort to uninspired and 
justifiable symbolism, it was inevitable that the 



260 THE OPEN FIRE 

Divine Word should be immensely suggestive to 
her sanctified mind, which found plain passages 
pregnant with, or pointing to, great meanings, 
which penetrated by intuition to the heart of 
sacred matters, and flashed a searchlight into 
mysteries profound. She is thrilled by the tran- 
scendent sublimity of the biblical language, and 
perceives the depth of the riches stored in the 
Holy Book. To the feast of fat things spread 
therein she sits down, not with a critic's captious- 
ness, but with a hearty and healthy appetite, not 
for chemical analysis, but for delectable mastica- 
tion and nutritious assimilation of the finest of 
God's wheat. While best known for the gorgeous 
diction and brilliant imagery of those sacred 
poems which set her in the select company of 
Herbert, and Vaughan, and Crashaw, and South- 
well, and Herrick, and Keble, and Faber, and 
Cardinal Newman, and which associate her as a 
woman in her own time with Adelaide Procter, 
Jean Ingelow, Dora Greenwell, and Elizabeth 
Barrett Browning, Miss Rossetti also poured no 
small portion of herself into the list of devotional 
prose works entitled Annus Domini; Seek and 
Find; Called to Be Saints; Letter and Spirit, or 
Notes on the Commandments; Time Flies; and 
The Face of the Deep, the latest, longest, and 
noblest of her prose volumes, a semiexpository 
meditation on the book of Revelation, the chief 
lesson of which book she considers to be patience. 
As might be expected from a nature whose very 



ROSSETTI'S DEVOTIONAL PROSE 261 

pulse-beats were rhythmical, a subtle unmarked 
rhythm often makes her prose as musical as poe- 
try, and scattered here and there through the 
volumes just named are bits of verse, "exquisite 
solemn lyrics, fervid and intense in their piety, 
ecstatic in their rapture." 

Not all of Miss Rossetti's writings are on sa- 
cred themes. Among her poems are bird-songs, 
child-songs, laughing lyrics, and many a piece of 
airy fantasy full of gayeties and frolicsome im- 
aginings. Yet, beyond question the value of her 
life is found in her religious writings, glorified 
by their glowing faith and intense with the pas- 
sionate devotion of a saintly woman's soul. 
Flowers, like other earthly objects, are to her em- 
blems of holier things. "Hope is like a harebell 
trembling from its birth"; "Faith is like a lily 
lifted white and high." How fully the natural 
was to her a mirror of the supernatural, and 
things physical were parables of things spiritual, 
is seen in the "Parable of Nature" which she saw 
one summer night when the gas was lighted in 
her little room and she perceived on the paper- 
less bare wall a spider puzzled and frightened 
at his own shadow which he could not under- 
stand or get away from. This poor self -haunted 
spider, running madly about and trying to dis- 
engage himself from the horrible inalienable pur- 
suing presence, was to her a symbol of the im- 
penitent sinner who, having outlived enjoyment, 
remains isolated irretrievably with his own hor- 



262 THE OPEN FIRE 

rible, loathsome self. Among the thoughts most 
constantly present Tvdth her are the misery and 
exceeding sinfulness of sin and the subtlety and 
dreadful peril of temptation. "The Goblin Mar- 
ket/' one of her most important productions, is 
an allegory of temptation and redemption; and 
the poem entitled "Amor Mundf' is an allegory 
of how love of the world inevitably leads to de- 
struction, the beaten way it treads being "hell's 
own track." Her sense of the universal need of 
forgiveness is seen in the prayer she offers after 
reading the words in Rev. 15. 4, "For thou only 
art holy." This is her prayer : 

O Lord Jesus Christ, who only art holy, forgive, I im- 
plore thee, forgive and purge the unholiness of thy saints, 
the unholiness of thy little ones, the unholiness of thy 
penitents, the unholiness of the unconverted, the unholi- 
ness of me a sinner. God be merciful to us sinners. Amen. 

The true insight and balanced judgment of this 
positive and unwavering believer are seen in her 
comment on the doubt of Thomas : "St. Thomas 
doubted. Skepticism is a degree of unbelief; 
equally, therefore, it is a degree of belief. It 
may be a degree of faith. St. Thomas doubted; 
but simultaneously he loved. Whence it follows 
that his case was all along hopeful." A capacity 
for pungency marks her sharp word concerning 
atheism : "Devils are not atheists ; we are em- 
phatically certified that they believe and tremble. 
. . . Atheism appears to be a possibility con- 
fined to a lower nature. *No man hath seen 



ROSSETTI'S DEVOTIONAL PROSE 263 

God at any time' : that flesh and blood, which 
cannot inherit the kingdom of God, may, if it 
will, deny his existence." To her invisible things 
are visible, and a populous spiritual world is 
near and real and vivid. She sees the spirits of 
the blessed martyrs, luminous and lovely. She be- 
lieves that even here we are surrounded by unseen 
hosts in whose company we shall hereafter re- 
joice in a world without end. She takes the 
Scriptures literally and believes in guardian 
spirits watching over us. She thinks "dear an- 
gels and dear disembodied saints, unseen around 
us," who dwell in glory which we cannot see, won- 
der that our hearts so often faint and our steps lag 
along the heavenward way. She loves God all the 
more "because he hath given his angels charge 
concerning his own to keep them in all their 
ways; because the armies of heaven pitch their 
camp around the faithful when need arises; be- 
cause blessed spirits minister to the heirs of sal- 
vation; because they rejoice over one sinner that 
repenteth. . . . When it seems (as sometimes 
through revulsion of feeling and urgency of 
Satan it may seem ) that our yoke is uneasy and 
our burden unbearable, because our life is pared 
down and subdued and repressed to an intoler- 
able level; and so in one moment every instinct 
of our whole self revolts against our lot, and we 
loathe this day of quietness and sitting still, and 
writhe under a sudden sense of all we have ir- 
revocably foregone, of the right hand, or foot, or 



264 THE OPEN FIRE 

eye cast from us, of the lialtingness and maimed- 
ness of our entrance (if enter we do at last) into 
life — then the Seraphim of Isaiah's vision mak- 
ing music in our memory revive hope in our 
heart." 

The deep problems of religion and theology 
fascinated her to much reading, study, and 
thought, and to some discussion. The old in- 
scrutable mystery of the origin of evil she sought 
to penetrate, but came only to this conclusion : 

Absolute darkness engulfs me when I attempt to realize 
the origin of evil. Yet in that darkness, which may be felt, 
one point I dare not hesitate to hold fast and assert: evil 
had its origin in the free choice of a free will. "Without 
free will there can be neither virtue nor vice; without free 
choice neither offense nor merit. 

The difficult problem of Divine prescience and 
human free will she discussed with her friend 
Rev. W. Garrett Horder, editor of The Poefs 
Bible, of which discussion she says : 

He once put it to me that the choice of each man's free 
will must be unknown beforehand even to God Omniscient 
himself. To foreknow would involve to preordain, and that 
which is ordained is not free: — so, I suppose, my friend 
might have gone on to argue, handling a mystery far be- 
yond my comprehension. . . . But limited Omniscience is 
a contradiction in terms. A being, any one of whose at- 
tributes is limited, cannot be our Infinite Lord God. 

Once she illustrates her point against Mr. Hor- 
der by telling him that her foreknowledge that 
he will take kindly what she writes to him does 
not compel him to do so. 



ROSSETTI'S DEVOTIONAL PROSE 265 

Of the devil she writes : 

Being a destroyer, our safety lies in recognizing, ac- 
knowledging, fleeing him as such. And further: so far as we 
are constituted our brother's Keeper, our brother's safety 
lies in our plainly calling him a destroyer; and never ton- 
ing him down as a negation of good, or even unloathingly 
as an archangel ruined. Sins for like reason should be 
spoken of simply as what they are, never palliatingly or 
jocosely. Lies and drunkenness should bear their own 
odious appellations, not any conventional substitute. But 
some sins "it is a shame to speak of"; true: so let us not 
speak of them except under necessity; and, under necessity 
even, always truthfully. "Woe unto them that call evil 
good, and good evil; and put darkness for light, and light 
for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bit- 
ter." . . . Whilst studying the devil I must take heed that 
my study become not devilish by reason of sympathy. As 
to gaze down a precipice seems to fascinate the gazer 
toward a shattering fall, so is it spiritually perilous to gaze 
on excessive wickedness, lest its immeasurable scale should 
fascinate us as if it were colossal without being mon- 
strous. 

And then she continues the expression of her 
views by a quotation from her sister Maria Fran- 
cesea's Shadow of Dante in which Dante's Luci- 
fer is contrasted with Milton's Satan and com- 
mended as being the wiser and truer description 
of the two. Maria wrote : 

Some there are who, gazing upon Dante's Hell mainly 
with their own eyes, are startled by the grotesque element 
traceable through the Cantica as a whole, and shocked at 
the even ludicrous tone of not a few of its parts. Others 
seek, rather, to gaze on Dante's Hell with Dante's eyes; 
these discern in that grotesqueness a realized horror, in 
that ludicrousness a sovereign contempt of evil. . . . They 
remember that the Divine Eternal Wisdom himself, the 



266 THE OPEN FIRE 

very and infallible Truth, has characterized impiety and 
sin as Folly; and they feel in the depths of the nature 
wherewith he has created them that whatsoever else Folly 
may be and is, it is none the less essentially monstrous and 
ridiculous. ... A sense of the utter degradation, loath- 
someness, despicableness of the soul which by deadly sin 
besots Reason and enslaves Free Will passes from the 
Poet's mind into theirs; while the ghastly definiteness and 
adaptation of the punishments enables them to touch with 
their finger the awful possibility and actuality of the 
Second Death, and thus for themselves as for others to 
dread it more really, to deprecate it more intensely, Dante's 
Lucifer does appear "less than Archangel ruined," immeas- 
urably less; for he appears Seraph willfully fallen. No 
illusive splendor is here to dazzle eye and mind into sym- 
pathy with rebellious pride; no vagueness to shroud in 
mist things fearful or things abominable. Dante's devils 
are hateful and hated, Dante's reprobates loathsome and 
loathed, despicable and despised, or at best miserable and 
commiserated. . . . Dante is guiltless of seducing any soul 
of man toward making or calling Evil his Good. 

As regards whatever leads to temptation, espe- 
cially temptation through the senses, Christina 
Rossetti is of opinion that a rule of avoidance, 
rather than of self-conquest or even of self-re- 
straint, is a sound and scriptural rule : 

For the Jews were bidden . . . absolutely to do away 
with all idols and to obliterate every trace of idolatry; 
not one image might they hoard as a curiosity, or an 
antiquity or a work of art; neither were they encouraged, 
even if under any circumstances it might be lawful for 
them, so much as to investigate the subjects of heathen 
rites. . . . "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it 
doth not yet appear what we shall be; but we know that, 
when he shall appear, we shall be like him ; for we shall see 
him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him 
purifieth himself, even as he is pure." Blessed indeed are 



ROSSETTI'S DEVOTIONAL PROSE 267 

the pure in heart, for they shall see God. With such a 
beatitude in view, with so inestimable a gain or loss at 
stake, with such a prize of our high calling in Christ Jesus 
to yearn for, all we forego, or can by any possibility be 
required to forego, becomes — could we but behold it with 
purged impartial eyes — ^becomes as nothing. True, all our 
lives long we shall be bound to refrain our soul and keep 
it low: but what then? For the books we now forbear 
to read, we shall one day be endued with wisdom and 
knowledge. For the music we will not listen to, we shall 
join in the song of the redeemed. For the pictures from 
which we turn, we shall gaze unabashed on the Beatific 
Vision. For the companionship we shun, we shall be wel- 
comed into angelic society and the communion of tri- 
umphant saints. For the amusements we avoid, we shall 
keep the supreme Jubilee. For the pleasures we miss, we 
shall abide, and forevermore abide, in the rapture of 
heaven. It cannot be much of a hardship to dress mod- 
estly and at a small cost ... if with a vivid conviction we 
are awaiting the white robes of the redeemed. . . . Solo- 
mon in all his glory was outdone by a lily of the field, and 
all his glory left him a prey to sensuality, and this launched 
him into shameless patronage of idol worship; until the 
glory of his greatness and the luster of his gifts, com- 
bined with the heinousness of his defection, have remained 
bequeathed to all ages as an awful warning. 

This pure and shielded woman, full of innocence, 
has a keen and alarmed sense of the dangerous 
allurements of evil, and, full of gentleness, main- 
tains and inculcates a sternly uncompromising 
attitude toward all sin. To imperiled souls this 
is her exhortation : 

strip sin bare from voluptuousness of music, fascination 
of gesture, entrancement of the stage, rapture of poetry, 
glamour of eloquence, seduction of imaginative emotion; 
strip it of every adornment, let it stand out bald as in the 
Ten stern Commandments. Study sin, when study it we 



268 THE OPEN FIRE 

must, not as a relishing pastime, but as an embittering 
deterrent. Lavish sympathy on the sinner, never on the 
sin. Say, if we will and if we mean it. Would God I had 
died for thee; nevertheless let us flee at the cry of such, 
lest the earth swallow us up also. 

The deep emotion and holy aspiration excited 
in this devout disciple by her reverent searching 
of God's word are seen in the prayer evoked in 
her by the contemplation of the Saviour's pas- 
sion: 

Let thy pierced Heart win us to love Thee, thy torn 
Hands incite us to every good work, thy wounded Feet 
urge us on errands of mercy, thy crown of thorns prick 
us out of sloth, thy thirst draw us to thirst after the Liv- 
ing Water thou givest; let thy Life be our pattern while 
we live, and thy Death be our triumph over death when 
we come to die. Amen. 

Similar in style and spirit are other noble, 
stately, and uplifted prose litanies addressed to 
Christ, full of adoration and supplication, of 
which the following is a fair example : 

"Lord Jesus, lovely and pleasant art thou in thy high 
places, thou Center of bliss, whence all bliss flows. 
Lovely also and pleasant wast thou in thy lowly taber- 
nacles, thou sometime Center wherein humiliations and 
sorrows met. 
Thou who wast Center of a stable, with harmless cattle 
and some shepherds for thy Court, 
Grant us lowliness. 
Thou who wast Center of Bethlehem when Wise Men wor- 
shiped thee. 

Grant us wisdom. 
Thou who wast Center of the Temple, with doves or young 
pigeons and four saints about the©. 
Grant us purity. 



ROSSETTI'S DEVOTIONAL PROSE 269 

Thou who wast Center of Egypt, which harhored thee and 
thine in exile, 

Be thou our refuge. 
Thou who wast Center of Nazareth where thou wast 
brought up, 

Sanctify our homes. 
Thou who wast Center of all waters at thy Baptism in the 
River Jordan, 

Still sanctify wa-ter to the mystical washing away 
of sin. 
Thou who wast Center of all desolate places during forty 
days and forty nights, 
Comfort the desolate. 
Thou who wast Center of a marriage feast at Cana, 

Bless our rejoicing. 
Thou who wast Center of a funeral procession at Nain, 

Bless our mourning, 
Thou who wast Center of Samaria as thou sattest on the 
well, 

Bring back strayed souls. 
Thou who wast the Center of all heights on the Mount 
of Beatitudes, 

Grant us to sit with Thee in heavenly places. 
Thou who wast the Center of sufferers by the Pool of 
Bethesda, 
Heal us. 
Thou who wast Center of all harvest ground when Thou 
wentest through the cornfields with thy disciples. 

Make us to bring forth to Thee thirty, sixty, a 
hundredfold. 

Christina Rossetti inherited in an exceptional 
degree the artist temperament ; romance, melody, 
and exquisite delight in beauty were born in her 
and rippled through her veins with her Italian 
blood. But this affluent and efflorescent nature 
was chastened and spiritualized, every imagina- 
tion brought into subjection to Christ and dedi- 



270 THE OPEN FIRE 

cated to his service. Keenly alive and enam- 
ored as she was of all beautiful things in the 
world, she had learned that nothing else is half 
so lovely as are "the hands which have worked 
the works of Christ, the feet which treading in 
his footsteps have gone about doing good, the lips 
that have spread abroad his name, and the lives 
which have been counted loss for him." Suc- 
cessive bereavements brought her to know the 
feeling of those who are oppressed with a sense 
of the transitoriness of life and who can find at 
times no glory in the sky nor music in the mur- 
mur of the breeze because everything on earth is 
visibly passing away, while at such times the 
peace of an unreached and unseen heaven seems 
placed too high; and sometimes in moments of 
depression and physical weakness her thoughts 
of death take on a somber and repulsive realism. 
Yet she bore her sorrows, and prolonged suffer- 
ing as well, with submissive patience, sustained 
by the conviction that God's angel, Death, would 
release her from pain and admit her to a state of 
ineffable blessedness. Her life was pure, sweet, 
and gracious, so that a London journal could 
say : "Her noblest books were those books with- 
out words which she lived"; in like manner, as 
she herself w^rote concerning her Notes on the 
Commandments^ "My mother's life is a far more 
forcible comment on the commandments than are 
any words of mine." 

With her writings in vferse and prose before 



ROSSETTI S DEVOTIONAL PROSE 271 

us it seems safe to agree with her eulogists, who 
say that as loug as Christianity remains as it is, 
the most vital and dominant force in the lives 
of many millions of English-speaking people, the 
name of Christina Rossetti is likely to be hon- 
ored and cherished in the list of illustrious writ- 
ers who have enriched the literature of Christian 
teaching by their consecrated genius. 



THE VOLUMINOUS UNIMPORTANCE OP 
POSITIVISM 

We know of no modern system of thought that 
is at once so intellectually pretentious and of so 
little account as positivism. Nothing aspiring 
to be regarded as a religion is so ambitious in its 
scope, and so elaborate in its presentation, or pro- 
pounded with a brow so grave and weighty, and 
yet withal is so unimportant, as the so-called 
Religion of Humanity. Both its inventor, Au- 
guste Comte, and its apologist, Frederic Harri- 
son, have been voluminous writers. Comte was 
the author of numerous volumes, of which he 
devoted to the setting forth of his scheme of doc- 
trine more than a dozen : his Positive Philosophy 
(6 volumes), his Positive Polity (4 volumes), his 
Subjective Synthesis, his General Yiew, and his 
Catechism. Mr. Harrison is also author of a 
dozen or more volumes, some of which are di- 
rectly given to the exposition and advocacy of 
his particular version of Comte's system, and all 
of which take their perspective from the posi- 
tivist point of view and color their atmosphere 
with the Religion of Humanity. His two most 
recent books are The Creed of a Layman and 
The Philosophy of Common Sense. Comte's 
scheme, interpreted by Harrison, purports to be 
a vast synthesis of knowledge equaled in inclu- 

272 



UNIMPORTANCE OF POSITIVISM 273 

siveness among ancients only by Aristotle's and 
among moderns only by Herbert Spencer's. Yet 
this ambitious and laborious scheme, offered as a 
substitute for Christianity, is of far less import- 
ance to the Christian world than, for example, 
Parseeism is : indeed, its practical significance is 
almost microscopic. 

It is certainly numerically unimportant. A 
census to ascertain the number of positivists in 
London found seventeen. Andrew Lang, com- 
menting upon Harrison's book. The Creed of a 
Layman^ remarks, "It is not the creed of many 
laymen— only about thirty-five and a half, as the 
irreverent say." Mr. Harrison expresses a doubt 
whether since the death of Auberon Spencer, Her- 
bert Spencer has any follower. We are of opin- 
ion that Mr. Harrison has even fewer followers 
than Mr. Spencer. Mr. Harrison does not think 
it reasonable to expect that positivism should 
draw disciples by thousands as, he says, the gos- 
pel did in the days of the apostles. He is quite 
right in so thinking; and it seems proper to add 
just here, for the information of those who, like 
Mr. Harrison, appear not to know the fact, that 
the gospel which was so powerful in apostolic 
days proves itself just as mighty now, and in 
many lands is drawing vast multitudes to the feet 
of Him who was lifted up that he might draw all 
men unto him. It is hardly too much to say 
that positivism draws nobody. Its inventor was 
an impractical theorist but little acquainted with 



274 THE OPEN FIRE 

human nature, its qualities or its needs. He lived 
and died an obscure teacher of mathematics in 
Paris. The intellectual atmosphere in which he 
worked out his theories and constructed a new 
religion for mankind was about as rarefied as are 
the regions of the differential calculus and as 
remote from actual human life as is the summit 
of Mount Kunchin-Ginga or the planet Jupiter. 
And it is about as attractive to the average hu- 
man being as is the working out of an algebraic 
problem. 

The attempt to get people to worship the hu- 
man race meets insurmountable difficulties. To 
the normal man the proposition to worship hu- 
manity is simply preposterous. One trouble with 
positivism^s worship is the obvious and ex- 
tremely marked undivineness of its offered di- 
vinity. Human nature as found is not preemi- 
nently godlike. Mr. Huxley said he would as 
soon worship a wilderness of apes as Comte's ra- 
tionalized conception of humanity. Moreover, 
what positivism presents for our worship is a 
mere abstraction. "The Great Being, Human- 
ity"? There is, there can be, no such being; there 
are only men and women. No one will adore an 
abstraction. The worship of human beings is 
not unknown. Men do worship Humanity, but 
in sections, in very definite, individual and ap- 
prehensible sections. The old servitor in "The 
Flight of the Duchess,'^ speaking of the fair 
young serving maid, says: "Since Jacynth was 



UNIMPORTANCE OF POSITIVISM 275 

like a June rose, why a humble adorer of Jacynth 
of course was your servant." Those who incline 
to the worship of humanity prefer to have it in a 
form as real, as vividly and tangibly concrete as 
Jacynth. No metaphysical abstraction for them. 
Wholly theoretical and utterly impracticable 
is the Comte-Harrison positivist religion of hu- 
manity. Not of its inventor or of its interpreter 
will it ever be said as was said of Lord Kelvin, 
lofty scientist and lowly Christian, over his 
newly buried remains in Westminster Abbey un- 
der the shadow of Sir Isaac Newton's tomb, that 
he "united in extraordinary degree the specula- 
tive and the practical faculties of the human in- 
tellect'': "The greatest reasoner at work in 
physics in his time, and at the moment of his 
death without dispute the greatest scientific 
genius in the world." A reasoner, a thinker, a 
mathematician, beside whom the obscure little 
teacher of mathematics, named Comte, was an 
insignificant pigmy. The scientific world proudly 
claims for Lord Kelvin reverence because of his 
matchless genius and because of gratitude for 
the immeasurable value of his practical services 
to the whole human race. He never undertook to 
construct or invent a new religion to take the 
place of Christianity; and, curiously enough, in 
contrast with the voluminousness of positivism's 
apostles, he wrote only one book, a volume on a 
part of analytical mechanics, and that in collab- 
oration with Professor Tait. 



276 THE OPEN FIRE 

The only living apostle of positivism tells us 
that it takes years to master the full meaning of 
its scheme of thought as a whole. In the nature 
of the case only the leisure class could find time 
to study it; and the leisure class do not study. 
There are perhaps several persons who think they 
know just what positivism is, but they cannot 
tell to any great extent. They are like the pupil 
who, when standing examination in geography, 
said he knew what country Vienna was the capi- 
tal of, but "lacked the flow of language to ex- 
press it." The only one who has the flow of lan- 
guage to express what positivism is, luminously 
and voluminously, seems to be Mr. Frederic Har- 
rison, an amiable, fluent, and engaging ex- 
pounder, the one exponent in our day of the sys- 
tem of doctrine called positivism, which Mr. 
Huxley described as "Catholicism minus Chris- 
tianity." One irreverent person spoke of it as 
consisting of three persons and no Grod, the three 
persons being Mr. Harrison and two obscure 
coadjutors. Auguste Comte, the originator of 
positivism, hoped for a kind of political papacy 
which would regenerate society by the exer- 
cise of authority. Stuart Mill called positiv- 
ism the completest system of spiritual and 
temporal despotism which ever emanated from 
a human brain, excepting possibly that of 
Ignatius Loyola. It is claimed that Mr. Har- 
rison has propounded a more definite and sys- 
tematized substitute for the police power than 



UNIMPORTANCE OF POSITIVISM 277 

any other that has been devised. But what Mill 
said of the despotic character of the scheme is so 
true that its establishment in an age of freedom 
would be utterly impossible. Goldwin Smith 
pointed out the want of originality in positiv- 
ism's scheme, its best being borrowed from Chris- 
tianity. He said that "Comte's great Being, Hu- 
manity, is Christ's brotherhood of man under 
another name." So the scheme has the unim- 
portance of superfluousness. More than once in 
The Creed of a Layman Mr. Harrison acknowl- 
edges the efficiency of Christianity. On page 192 
he says that the religion of Moses and of Christ 
has proved itself able to "guide lives, curb pas- 
sions, give light to despair, and import uncon- 
querable force to societies, nations, races." Un- 
til something appears that can do all this miracu- 
lous work better, it is "good business" to let the 
religion of Moses and of Christ go on attending 
to it, and thank heaven for giving us something 
which, by the confession even of its enemies, can 
do it. The Gospel is in no danger of being super- 
seded. Christianity is content to abide by the 
pragmatic test, "By their fruits ye shall know 
them." Positivism, with all its august, imposing, 
and pretentious intellectualism, would be num- 
bered by Carlyle among what he denominated 
"rosewater imbecilities." Its vast mental effort 
has only succeeded in adding to what Andrew 
Lang calls "the vast dreariness of ineffectual 
things." Positivism is no match for the vicious- 



278 THE OPEN FIRE 

ness of human depravity and the virulent malig- 
nancy of wickedness. On the non-Christian side 
it is of far less consequence than the Salvation 
Army is on the Christian side. Positivism might 
be proud of itself if it had one thousandth part 
of the Army's efficiency and power for good. The 
Army adds one more to the list of things effec- 
tual. The convicts at Sing Sing would jeer 
positivism off the premises: "Adore the great 
Being, Humanity? Human nature as we know 
it is far from being adorable." What would 
Frederic Harrison offer to Maud Ballington 
Booth as a substitute for the parable of the 
prodigal son? Positivism cannot lift even the 
intellectual level of the masses of mankind be- 
cause it does not reach them. Lecky, the his- 
torian, a freethinker pledged to no church, says 
that Methodism "raised the standard of intellect 
in England to a degTee no man can compute.'' 
No historian is likely ever to make such a record 
concerning positivism. Henry M. Stanley, the 
African explorer, once wrote: "When I was at 
Lake Victoria, eighteen years ago, there was not 
a missionary there. Now there are forty thou- 
sand Christians and two hundred churches. The 
natives are enthusiastic converts, and would 
spend their last penny to acquire a Bible." How 
long would it take the missionaries of positivism 
to accomplish such a result? But we forget ; pos- 
itivism has no missionaries, as also it has no 
Bible. The China Times, a paper published in 



UNIMPORTANCE OF POSITIVISM 279 

Tientsin, not under missionary influence, re- 
cently bore the following testimony to the power 
of Christianity : "The fact is that without persist- 
ent missionary work and without strong mission- 
ary influence here, life in Tientsin would soon be 
intolerable for foreign residence. The active in- 
fluences for good in this town are almost all the 
results of or intimately connected with the mis- 
sions. The influence of the missions is far 
greater in Chinese centers than at the treaty 
ports. The daily life in many of the inland towns 
and villages would be vastly different were it not 
for the mission influence. . . . It is a singular 
thing that of the hospitals, schools, churches, 
benevolent societies, soldiers' and sailors' homes, 
temperance societies, the anti-opium work, the 
work in alleviation of the effect of vice as well as 
for its prevention, almost all is the product, in 
whole or part, of mission influence, or promoted 
or maintained by persons intimately associated 
with the missions. In short, the philanthropic 
work in China, as at home, is mainly religious. 
One looks in vain for hospitals or schools sup- 
ported by disciples of Herbert Spencer, or for 
an anti-opium fund maintained by followers of 
Haeckel. [This is equally true of the disciples 
of Comte.] If the philosophic searchers for truth 
of these non-Christian creeds had ever roused a 
people from apathy to activity in an unselfish 
cause, or had ever produced anything but selfish- 
ness and self consideration, they might have some 



280 ' THE OPEN FIRE 

value. At this moment, when the long, steady 
and patient work of many years is beginning to 
show its fruit, when the greatest reform move- 
ments that China has ever known are beginning 
to take shape, when vice is beginning to climb 
down and the opium dealers to close their shops, 
when, in short, the silent work is developing into 
that which everyone can see — this is not the time 
when missions can feel disheartened." Not in 
any spot on earth has the alertest newspaper 
discovered any such results produced by or under 
any of the non-Christian creeds. "By their fruits 
ye shall know them." The non-Christian creeds 
are scant of fruits. The Christian gospel stands 
supreme and sole as the one potent and effectual 
force for the salvation, elevation, and ameliora- 
tion of the world; and all the laboriously elabo- 
rated schemes of non-Christian philosophies at- 
tain only to a tediously voluminous unimpor- 
tance. Nearly thirty years ago Frederic Harri- 
son spoke of "The final issue of the mighty Assize 
of religions, which this generation and the next 
are destined to try out." We must be nearly half 
way through that "mighty Assize," Does any 
Christian feel dismayed? Is there anywhere on 
earth the faintest sign which indicates that the 
gospel of Jesus Christ is to be superseded by 
positivism, the most marked charactertistic of 
which is its voluminous unimportance? 



THE VOGUE AND VERSATILITY OF 
WONDERLAND ALICE 

Alice was a little girl, daughter of Doctor 
Greek-Lexicon Liddell, aged "exactually seven," 
who fell down a rabbit-hole in a mathematician's 
mind on the grounds of Oxford University, and, 
after many unparalleled adventures, came to the 
surface for a career of popularity apparently 
boundless and endless. 

Few things so pique curiosity as a dark mys- 
tery, and few mysteries are so secretive and teas- 
ing as an apparently inhabited hole, whether of 
rabbit, or rat, or chipmunk, or prairie-dog, or 
snake, or salamander, particularly to individuals 
of an investigating turn of mind such as children, 
cats, scientists, ferrets, and terriers. Into any 
such opening the quest for wonder is likely to 
go head foremost. A hole has various values. 
To many a hunted creature a convenient and 
easily accessible one has been a welcome refuge. 
At sundry times and in divers places an ex- 
cessively unpopular person has been advised 
by his fellow citizens to crawl into his hole and 
pull the hole in after him. 

A rat-hole has been definitely listed among 
personal assets by a high authority in the follow- 
ing prudent private letter of recommendation, 
written many years ago in Springfield, Illinois : 

281 



282 THE OPEN FIRE 

Mr. is a lawyer of some reputation. He has a 

wife and two children that ought to be worth a good deal 
to a man. He has an oflace with a desk and some chairs in 
it, and a rat-hole that will bear looking into. I can recom- 
mend him for any position that he is fit for. 

Yours truly, 

A. LINCOLN. 

To fall into a hole is not considered good for- 
tune, and to fall down a rabbit-hole into im- 
mortal fame is contrary to all human experience, 
the height or, rather, the depth of improbability. 
Yet we have the record of that event from an 
ought-to-be-veracious clergyman of the Church of 
England, a mathematically exact authority in 
higher calculus, who, traveling incognito, regis- 
tered as "Lewis Carroll" at the road houses in 
the country of Light Literature. 

Alice made her first appearance over fifty years 
ago and has not yet announced a farewell ap- 
pearance, but is still the most popular little girl 
in the world. She, with her drolly solemn 
troupe, the Gryphon, the Mock Turtle, the Wal- 
rus, the Oysters, the Mad Hatter, the Cheshire 
Cat, and all the rest of her grave-gay merry- 
makers and wisdom-mongers, entertains her vast 
public with a continuous performance three- 
hundred-and-sixty-five days in every year. She 
has passed into the consciousness of the English- 
speaking race. Hugh Walpole says the Mad Hat- 
ter and the Mock Turtle have become part of the 
English language. We judge that Alice is un- 
translatable into any other tongue. No circus 



WONDERLAND ALICE 283 

that ever came to town matches her for setting 
all small boys and small girls wild. She is like 
the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who, when he piped 
his tune, had the town's children dancing after 
him in flocks; but with this difference, that her 
magic spell spares neither sex nor age, but "mows 
the bearded grain at a breath and the flowers 
that grow between." Children of all ages from 
six to seventy follow in her train. In Chicago 
the street urchins are out looking for her. A lit- 
the girl stops at the door of Jane Addams' Hull 
House, w^here Wonderland is sometimes staged, 
and asks, "Does Alice in Wonderland stay here 
always?" That young children flock after her is 
not strange; but learned and venerable scholars 
and even bishops and other clergy also succumb 
to her charms. A. C. Benson remembers seeing 
Bishop Lightfoot, during a long day's coach- 
drive in Wales, sitting all the way immersed in 
a small red book, refusing to look at the scenery, 
and every now and then exploding with laughter 
which made the tears run down his face. He was 
reading Alice in Wonderland. Again, when A. 
C. Benson tries in these anxious days to warn 
us against becoming victims of worry, he calls 
on Alice to tell us that if we get into the habit 
of carrying too many cares on our mind we will 
invoke upon ourselves the fate of the bread-and- 
butter fly in Through the Looking -Glass, whose 
food was weak tea with cream in it. "But sup- 
posing it cannot flnd any?" said Alice. 



284 THE OPEN FIRE 

"Then it dies/' says the Gnat, who is acting the 
part of interpreter. 

"But that must happen very often !" said Alice. 

"It always happens T says the Gnat with som- 
ber emphasis. 

But Alice is not alone the Play Girl of the 
Western world and of the English-speaking race ; 
she is out at service as a sort of universal drudge, 
a maid of all work in the House of Life, with 
tasks so many and so multiplex as to recall the 
saying of the devout little boy in a very religious 
home who heard so many prayerful persons ask- 
ing God to do so many things that he remarked 
one day : "God must have a great many things on 
his mind. I don't think I'd like to be God." 

Alice is the most versatile and variously ac- 
complished of little girls, the most sought-after 
and extensively useful assistant to all man- 
ner of persons and all kinds of enterprises and 
industries. Beginning as Alice in Wonderland, 
she has become Alice in Congress, in the Cham- 
ber of Commerce, in the courts, in journalism, 
in university assemblies, in after-dinner speeches 
and even in such unlikely places as the pulpit 
and Wall Street. If she has not quite achieved 
omnipresence, she seems to be aiming at it; and 
she is more in need of a hundred hands than 
Briareus was. Her indispensability grows more 
and more apparent every day. 

Alice pervades magazines and newspapers. 
She appears in the Yale Review and the Hibbert 



WONDEKLAND ALICE 285 

Journal, and from time to time in other high- 
class reviews. On one and the same day she can 
be found on the editorial pages of four New 
York dailies, presenting the Walrus' tears and 
the Carpenter's doubt and the Oysters' protests 
against being eaten. 

Alice is in State's prison. Thomas Mott Os- 
borne's three-hundred-page account of his week 
spent voluntarily as a prisoner in Auburn Prison 
summons Alice from Wonderland with the Mad 
Hatter's conundrum, "Why is a raven like a 
writing-desk?" the propounding of which to pris- 
oners would seem like "cruel and unusual pun- 
ishment," as did the preaching of a venerable 
chaplain to the convicts, one of whom complained 
of it as illegal, telling the keeper it was no part 
of his sentence that he should be compelled to 
hear that man preach. 

Alice is helpful in the courts of law, sometimes 
spoken of as courts of justice, but occasionally 
characterized otherwise. The New Kepublic 
tells us that the records and documents in the 
United States government's dissolution suit 
against the Steel Trust made such an enormous 
pile, amounting to carloads, that the Federal 
Court at Trenton, New Jersey, which took four 
years to study the mass and decide the case, had 
to call on Alice to furnish extra help. And, says 
the veracious New Republic, Alice sent Bill, the 
Lizard, to assist the overworked stenographers 
and typewriters by writing out part of the rec- 



286 THE OPEN FIRE 

ords with his finger on the slate as he did in the 
famous case of the stealing of the Queen's Tarts. 

Politics and government cannot go on without 
Alice. The blistering New York Sun said that 
the history of the government's course in a cer- 
tain matter read like a chapter from Alice in 
Blunderland. In a campaign to down Tammany 
one of the great dailies warned the city that a 
certain party was misleading the public to follow 
Alice down a rat-hole into the Wonderland of 
Political Delusion. 

In Washington Alice is kept busy. Woodrow 
Wilson's Congress did not complete the revision 
of the tariff without invoking the wisdom of 
Wonderland, and seeking advice from Alice's 
Caterpillar. One day the Senate Committee on 
Foreign Relations called Alice into its private 
office, not to be dictated to like a stenographer 
but to dictate like a British militant suffragette, 
as if she were an authority on diplomacy and in- 
ternational law. In Washington the newspaper 
correspondents rely much on Alice. For exam- 
ple, they find Alice's "Jabberwocky" indispen- 
sable in their efforts to describe certain members 
of Congress — the Jabberwocky that, "with eyes 
of flame, came whiffling through the tulgey wood, 
and burbled as it came." 

Alice has been employed to criticize the doings 
of Congress. Some years ago a disgruntled Bos- 
tonian wrote concerning a bill proposed by a 
member of the House, named Hay: 



WONDEKLAND ALICE 287 

"I have just been reading the provisions of the 
Hay Army bill ; discouraged by this travesty on 
preparedness, I turned to the Looking Glass 
Country for refreshment. Was it allegory or 
prophecy which I found there recorded in the 
conversation of Alice with the King? 

" 'Another sandwich !' said the King. 

" 'There's nothing but hay left now/ the mes- 
senger said, peeping into the bag. 

" 'Hay, then,' the King murmured in a faint 
whisper. 

" 'There's nothing like eating hay when you're 
faint,' he remarked to Alice as he munched 
away. 

" 'I should think throwing cold water over you 
would be better,' Alice suggested. 

" 'I didn't say there was nothing better,' the 
King replied. 'I said there was nothing like it' 
Which Alice did not venture to deny." 

Alice has been seen in the theater. The author 
of "The Girl from Utah" found that the Salt 
Lake lady could not play her part properly with- 
out the aid of the Girl from Oxford ; so Alice had 
to be brought across the sea, though it is a longer 
way in every sense from Oxford to Utah than 
from Flanders to Tipperary. 

Alice is in the market reports. "The Sun 
which shines for all," in discussing the high cost 
of living, said that one of the specious explana- 
tions put forward to excuse the high price of ap- 
ples sounded like Alice in Buncombeland. "If 



288 THE OPEN FIRE 

you see it in the Sun it's so" sometimes : but at 
any rate the Sun has a genius for ingenious para- 
phrastic pilfering. 

Not without Alice can the problems of science 
and philosophy be settled. One writer show^s that 
the Darwinian theory of evolution can be most 
easily overthrown by the aid of Alice and the 
methods of the Mad Hatter. An eminent scholar 
of the Church of Rome, discussing Bergson's Phil- 
osophy and the Divine Fecundity, goes behind 
the Looking Glass with Alice for illustrations 
and analogies. With all due reverence be it said, 
we almost wonder how Dr. Lynn Harold Hough 
could finish his wonderfully keen, tingling, bril- 
liant book. The Quest for Wonder, without some 
reference to Alice, who was so much at home in 
her Wonderland. Actually while we read it we 
kept glancing down the bypaths to see if she were 
not hiding somewhere in the shrubbery and lis- 
tening surreptitiously to his story of his real 
wonderland, the Wonderland of the Soul. Now, 
to crown all, Gilbert K. Chesterton declares that 
Hans Andersen and Lewis Carroll have written 
the final philosophy of life ; so that anybody who 
offers disrespect to the Mock Turtle or the 
Gryphon or the Jabberwocky must reckon with 
the doughty pugnacity of Mr. Chesterton, be- 
sides having the Cheshire Cat grinning at him 
and the Queen shouting "Off with his head !" 

Alice is of assistance to professional critics of 
music in New York who cannot express their 



WONDERLAND ALICE 289 

meaning without resorting to her for aid in artic- 
ulating. One of those hypersensitive and ex- 
pressive creatures helps us to a full understand- 
ing by telling us that to a present-day audience 
"the old arias in Euryanthe seem like Alice in 
Wagner-Land popping out" — a statement of im- 
perfect clarity and truculent ingenuity. 

Alice was John TenniePs best friend and fame- 
maker. When that famous cartoonist of London 
Punch died at the age of ninety, more mention 
was made of his illustrations for Alice's Adven- 
tures in Wonderland and Through the Looking 
Glass than of his greatest political cartoons, 
some of which in their day powerfully affected 
public opinion and possibly influenced the des- 
tiny of nations. 

No library, however large or small, is complete 
without Alice. An author of note being asked 
to name the six books he would select to solace 
his solitude if left alone on a desert island for a 
year, included Alice's Adventures, "because," he 
said, "it is full of the enchantment of pure im- 
agination and makes one feel again the joy of 
childhood and youth." 

Theodore Roosevelt knew that the pig-skin li- 
brary, which he carried with him for his year of 
hunting big game in the wilds of Africa, could 
not do without her, and Alice in Wonderland was 
one of the books he took with him. When he 
came back from the jungles a Literary Review 
commenting on the series of addresses he de- 



290 THE OPEN FIRE 

livered in Norway, France, Germany, and Eng- 
land, said Ms style indicated that he had adopted 
the advice of the Duchess in Wonderland : "Take 
care of the sense and the sounds will take care of 
themselves." No adventures the jungle might 
furnish him could possibly equal hers in incred- 
ible wondrousness. The wildest heart of Africa 
is tame commonplace compared with Alice's 
Wonderland. The Smithsonian Institution will 
admit that it has no beasts like hers. 

If Harvard's venerable ex-president wishes to 
make his list of books for "a liberal education 
five feet long" really complete, he must give Alice 
a place on the shelf. Also, parenthetically, he 
might improve his "new religion three feet long" 
by adding some expression of the faith which 
was Lewis Carroll's and which was once thus ex- 
pressed : "Most assuredly do I accept to the full 
the doctrines that Christ died to save us, that we 
have no other way of salvation open to us but 
through his death, and that by faith in him, and 
through no merit of ours, we are reconciled to 
God: and most assuredly I can cordially say, 
'I owe all to Him who loved me and died on the 
cross of Calvary for me.' " 

Dr. R. C. Cabot, Harvard professor of Medi- 
cine, in his wise, noble, stimulating, and illu- 
minating book. What Men Live By, protests 
against confining children too much to dry text- 
books, and increases the popularity of Alice by 
calling her to testify that in Wonderland the 



WONDERLAND ALICE 291 

School History of England was used for wiping 
dry the wet company around the pool of tears, 
because the Dodo said, "It's the dryest thing I 
know." Another physician, however, Sir William 
Osier, apparently deplores the popularity of 
Alice, for he gravely remarks that the reading of 
Lewis Carroll's yarns by so many people is proof 
that the world is still in its childhood and not 
yet ready to put away childish things. Well, if 
Alice can prove that we are still youthful and 
if tours through Wonderland can help to keep us 
so, we shall not be so much in need of Dr. Osier's 
medical services to postpone arteriosclerosis of 
body and of mind and ward off Mrs. Partington's 
condition which she described as "getting old and 
infernal." 

All envious, caviling, morose high-brows ariB 
notified that Lewis Carroll is more popular than 
they are by the fact that a copy of the first edi- 
tion of his immortal classic has been sold 
in London for one thousand dollars, the record 
price for a book by any modern author. Few 
books have contributed so much to the pure 
gayety of nations as those of Lewis Carroll. Even 
an Adirondack winter at the Lake Placid Club 
might become dull and dreary if Alice did not 
arrive to enliven the place by staging the Mad 
Tea Party and the Mock- turtle scene ; though the 
grotesqueries of Wonderland scarcely exceed in 
queerness the distortions and contortions in or- 
thography achieved by the Josh Billings "scool" 



292 THE OPEN FIRE 

of misspelling, whose chief branch office appears 
to be at Lake Placid. 

The vogue and versatility of Alice are cer- 
tainly phenomenal for a litle girl "exactually 
seven," so genuinely feminine that she never 
grows any older. 

Sydney Smith wrote to a little girl, "Mind your 
arithmetic: without arithmetic life would be a 
howling wilderness." It is equally true that 
without Alice this world would be a desert waste. 

Many years ago Fales H. Newhall, in a sum- 
mer letter to Zion's Herald, described in his mas- 
terly fashion the glories of a gorgeous sunset, and 
then said : "Have you seen all this? If not, see it 
this day lest, when you lift up your eyes over 
the landscapes of heaven, you be ashamed to have 
the angels ask you to tell them about the sunsets 
of earth." 

To all childlike souls of whatever age, from 
six to seventy, it is proper to say : Have you read 
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking 
Glass? If not, read them this day, lest when you 
appear in good society anywhere on earth or in 
heaven, the very children (those innocents who 
are of the kingdom of heaven) put you to shame 
by exposing your ignorance of the very rudiments 
of a liberal education. 

Those who are of the Kingdom of heaven may 
reasonably expect to find transcendent enchant- 
ments in their quest for wonder when they fare 
forth upon what Charles Frohman, on the slant- 



WONDERLAND ALICE 293 

ing deck of the sinking Titanic, called "life's most 
beautiful adventure." For "eye hath not seen, 
nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart 
of man, the things which God hath prepared for 
them that love him," in the Wonderland of the 
Hereafter. 



VAGABOND ECHOES 

Bliss Carman is one of the real poets of Amer- 
ica; clean, high-minded, blithe, as surely born 
to sing as is the lark, the oriole, or the night- 
ingale, his singing as genuine as the bobolink's 
ecstasy. It seems a long time, all too long, since 
we had a volume from him. One of his admirers, 
weary of his silence, wrote to his publishers a 
while ago: "What has become of Bliss Carman? 
Has he stopped being poet? Please wake him 
up and tell him we miss him." He added 
Echoes from Vagahondia to the Songs from Vag- 
abondia which delighted us years ago. The au- 
thorship of those Songs Bliss Carman shared 
with Kichard Hovey. Singing afterward alone, 
he called his later songs Echoes from the dear old 
days of comradeship and wandering. These lines 
of remembrance are touched with the ache 
of missing : 

'"Tis May now in New England, 

And through the open door 
I see the creamy breakers, 
I hear the hollow roar. 

"Back to the golden marshes 
Comes Summer at full tide. 
But not the golden comrade 
Who was the Summer's pride." 

294 



VAGABOND ECHOES 295 

And these verses seem like another loyal and 
loving look backward to Kichard Hovey : 

"We traveled empty-handed 

With hearts all fear above, 
For we ate the bread of friendship. 
We drank the wine of love. 

"Through many a wondrous autumn. 

Through many a magic spring, 
We hailed the scarlet banners. 
We heard the blue-bird sing. 

"We looked dn life and nature 
With the eager eyes of youth, 
And all we asked or cared for 
Was beauty, joy, and truth. 

"We found no other wisdom, 
We learned no other way. 
Than the gladness of the morning. 
The glory of the day." 

Bliss Carman dedicated his Echoes to one who is 
described as "a spirit undismayed, confronting 
fortune with a gentle mirth, with love alike for 
Heaven and for Earth, thinking no ill, going her 
duteous ways, seeing the beauty round her all her 
days, playing her quiet part with tender strength 
and with a woman's heart." "The Last Day at 
Stormfield" is on the final hours of "our great 
funning friend,'' Mark Twain, who made his gen- 
eration laugh with his wit, putting smiles on even 
the faces of "keen-eyed, serious men who watch 
the sorry world and the gaudy pageant of life 
with pity and wisdom and love" ; and who leveled 



296 THE OPEN FIRE 

his merciless mirth at pompous shams. At 
Stormfield, his Connecticut home, on the last day 
of his life, Mark Twain for the last time opened 
a book. It was one of Carlyle's, that "dour 
and rugged philosopher who looked askance 
upon life, lurid, ironical, grim, yet sound at 
the core." He wearied quickly, laid the book and 
his glasses down on the bed, fell asleep, and in 
that sleep at twilight ceased to breathe. Bliss 
Carman fancies our American humorist in the 
other world consorting with Chaucer and Shake- 
speare and Moliere, with Cervantes not far off, 
and jesting with Dagonet, King Arthur's Fool. 
Kipling, too, is quoted as saying that "the great 
Clemens" was some relation to Cervantes. These 
glad Echoes are mostly of the spring, the sum- 
mer, the seashore, the hills, and the woods, but 
also of the city. "The Urban Pan" is the hurdy- 
gurdy man who returns when the magic days of 
spring bring stronger sun and milder air, the 
hand-organ man, swarthy and hairy, smiling up 
at your open windows expectant of dimes or 
nickels or coppers, casting his spell upon the 
town. 

"And so he follows down the block, 

A troop of children in his train, 
The light-foot dancers of the street 

Enamored of the reedy strain. 
I hear their laughter rise and ring 

Above the noise of truck and van. 
As down the mellow wind fades out 

The piping of the urban Pan." 



VAGABOND ECHOES 297 

Our poet, playing pagan for a while, as poets in 
their love of nature sometimes do, fancies he 
really hears the pipes of the Greek god Pan in 
the Catskills: 

"They say that he is dead, and now no more 
The reedy syrinx sounds among the hills. 
When the long summer heat is on the land. 
But I have heard the Catskill thrushes sing, 
And therefore am incredulous of death. 
Of pain and sorrow and mortality. 

"In those blue canons, deep with hemlock shade. 
In solitudes of twilight or of dawn, 
I have been rapt away from time and care 
By the enchantment of a golden strain 
As pure as ever pierced the Thracian wild, 
Filling the listener with a mute surmise. 

"At evening and at morning I have gone 
Down the cool trail between the beech-tree boles, 
And heard the haunting music of the wood 
Ring through the silence of the dark ravine. 
Flooding the earth with beauty and with joy 
And all the ardors of creation old. 

"And then within my Grecian heart awoke 
Remembrance of far-off and fabled years 
In the untarnished sunrise of the world, 
When clear-eyed Hellas in her rapture heard 
A slow mysterious piping wild and keen 
Thrill through her vales, and whispered, 'It is Pan!* " 

Is there anything or anybody now left that has 
not yet been set in verse by some singer? Daly 
makes himself the city laureate of Little Italy 
and glorifies the "Dago." Bliss Carman makes 
himself laureate not only of the hurdy-gurdy 
man, but, in his most notable city poem, of the 



298 THE OPEN FIRE 

familiar woman who helps drag the street-organ 
through the streets. His point of view is out- 
side the southeast entrance to Central Park, in 
sight of the equestrian statue of General Sher- 
man. Here is what he saw and says : 

"One August day I sat beside 
A cafe window open wide 
To let the shower-freshened air 
Blow in across the Plaza, where 
In golden pomp against the dark 
Green leafy background of the Park, 
Saint Gaudens's hero, gaunt and grim, 
Rides on with Victory leading him. 

"The wet, black asphalt seemed to hold 
In every hollow pools of gold, 
And clouds of gold and pink and gray 
Were piled up at the end of day, 
Far down the cross street, where one tower 
Still glistened from the drenching shower. 

"A weary white%aired man went by, 
Cooling his forehead gratefully 
After the day's great heat. A girl. 
Her thin white garments in a swirl 
Blown back against her breasts and knees. 
Like a Winged Victory in the breeze, 
Alive and modern and superb, 
Crossed from the circle to the curb. 

"We sat there watching people pass, 
Clinking the ice against the glass 
And talking idly — books or art. 
Or something equally apart 
From the essential stress and strife 
That rudely form and further life. 
Glad of a respite from the heat. 
When down the middle of the street, 



VAGABOND ECHOES 299 

Trundling a hurdy-gurdy, gay 

In spite of the dull-stifling day, 

Three street musicians came. The man. 

With hair and beard as black as Pan, 

Strolled on one side with lordly grace. 

While a young girl tugged at a trace 

Upon the other. And between 

The shafts there walked a laughing queen. 

Bright as a poppy, strong and free. 

What likelier land than Italy 

Breeds such abandon? Confident 

And rapturous in mere living spent 

Each moment to the utmost, there 

With broad, deep chest and kerchiefed hair. 

With head thrown back, bare throat, and waist 

Supple, heroic and free-laced. 

Between her two companions walked 

This splendid woman, chaffed and talked. 

Did half the work, made all the cheer 

Of that small company. 

"No fear 
Of failure in a soul like hers 
That every moment throbs and stirs 
With merry ardor, virile hope, 
Brave effort, nor in all its scope 
Has room for thought or discontent, 
Each day its own suflacient vent 
And source of happiness. 

"Without 
A trace of bitterness or doubt 
Of life's true worth, she strode at ease 
Before those lordly palaces, 
A simple heiress of the earth 
And all its joys by happy birth. 
Beneficent as breeze or dew, 
And fresh as though the world were new 
And toil and grief were not. How rare 
A personality was there!" 



300 THE OPEN FIRE 

In tribute to a very different character, Bliss 
Carman pauses *^0n Burial Hill/^ at Concord, 
in the old burying-ground where Concord men 
first laid their dead, and tells of the inscription 
in honor of the village pastor : 

"There stands simple, square, and unadorned, 
Our grandsire's altar tomb. 
Upon its dark gray slated top 
The long inscription reads. 
In stately phrase his townsmen's praise 
Of his deserts and deeds. 

"Their 'pastor of the Church of Christ/ 
They wish the world to feel 
The 'luster' of his ministry, 
His 'meekness' and his 'zeal.' 
I doubt not he deserved it all, 
And not a word of ill; 
For they were just, these men whose dust 
Lies here on Burial Hill. 

"Perhaps we wear the very guise 
And features that he wore, 
And with the look of his own eyes 
Behold his world once more. 
Would that his spirit too might live, 
While lives his goodly name, 
To move among the sons of men, 
'A minister of flame.' 

"O, might his magic gift of words. 
Not wholly passed away, 
Survive to be a sorcery 
In all men's hearths to-day, 
To plead no less for loveliness 
Than truth and goodness still. 
God rest you, sir, his minister 
Asleep on Burial Hill!" 



VAGABOND ECHOES 301 

One of these Echoes is a poet's reply to a little 
boy's question on his Christmas lesson about the 
Wise Men from the East : "Why were they three, 
instead of five or seven?" One is on the words, 
"He leadeth me beside the still waters; he re- 
storeth my soul." It is difficult to choose among 
these forty poems, and tastes would differ; the 
one which most holds us is entitled "Mirage." 
Its five pages are too long to quote and its story 
is not easy to condense, but its argument is just 
and true and glorious. The great truth in solu- 
tion in its hundred and seventy lines is that man 
is the culmination of all earthly grandeurs, the 
consummation and crowned king of the world. 
Nature's supreme and only use being to act as a 
setting for man's significance and to serve his 
needs. That is the meaning of Bliss Carman's 
saying that Beauty is "the superb eternal noun 
which takes no verb but love." A painter spends 
an enchanted summer at little Siasconset on the 
seaward side of the Island of Nantucket. At 
the season's end there stands upon his easel the 
most significant of all the summer's work. One 
day he had strolled along the beach to "Tom 
Nevers Head, the lone last land that fronts the 
ocean, lone and grand as when the Lord first bade 
it be for a surprise and mystery." There, all 
alone in the vast solitude of sea and shore and 
moor, the conviction came to him of the worth- 
lessness of the earth by its mere self. He saw 
and felt that beauty and grandeur are nothing 



302 THE OPEN FIRE 

without soul, and that it is the presence and the 
power of man the godlike that alone give mean- 
ing and use and reason to the world of nature; 
that earth's intention and raison d/etre is to be 
the arena and the setting for the human soul, 
with its aspirations and struggles, its joys and 
sorrows its loves and prayers and victories, its 
toils and triumphs, its exultations and its tears. 
Then he gave himself to putting this sublime con- 
viction on canvas. He painted first as power- 
fully as he could a picture of the sea and shore 
and sky, far outspread and high uplifted with all 
their majesty, beauty, and splendor of color, and 
then he painted into the middle of his picture "a 
vivid questing human face, up-gazing against the 
blue with eyes that heaven itself shone through, 
the lips half-parted as in prayer, scanning the 
heavens as if asking grace and confident of kind- 
ness from above; a face as tender as a happy 
girFs, where meet repose and ardor, strong and 
sweet ; looking as Virgin Mary might have looked 
into the annunciation angel's eyes with faith and 
fearlessness and innocence.'' The artist made all 
the glory and wonder of the universe bend and 
lean about that human head. And when he had 
finished the picture, a sermon on canvas, into 
which he had put his meaning with all his might 
and skill, he stands before it and proclaims its 
significance thus : 

"In other years when men shall say, 
'What was the painter's meaning, pray? 



VAGABOND ECHOES 303 

Why all this vast of sea and space, 
Just to enframe a woman's face?' 
Here is the pertinent reply, 
'What better use for earth and sky?* " 

To US this is the noblest of all the poems in these 
Echoes from Vagabondia. In these Echoes we 
hear Bliss Carman owning his subjection to the 
seductive spell of elemental things breathing on 
him through the nature-sounds he hears : 

"My forest cabin half-way up the glen 
Is solitary save for one wise thrush, 
The sound of falling waters and the wind 
Mysteriously conversing with the leaves." 

Our poet sitting at night by that seat and shrine 
and reservoir of primal elements, the hearth- 
stone, sings his closing verse : 

"The stormy midnight whispers, 

As I muse before the fire 
On the ashes of ambition 

And the embers of desire, 
*Life has no other logic 

And time no other creed 
Than: "I for joy will follow 

Where thou for love dost lead." ' " 

A soul might say that to its divine Saviour and 
Lord. 



BEATING THE DRUM OF ETERNITY. 

James Huneker_, brilliant literary critic, wrote 
of Eternity and the Town-Pump, the vast encom- 
passing the minute, the trivial overarched by the 
tremendous, the commonplace embosomed in the 
sublime. In 1912 three men of mark in the intel- 
lectual world came across the Atlantic to speak 
to American audiences: Rudolf Eucken, of Ger- 
many ; Henri Bergson, of France ; Alfred Noyes, 
of England ; men of eminence and fame in phil- 
osophy and literature, as well known probably to 
the reading public in this country as in Europe ; 
masters of thought and speech who, in Andrew 
Carnegie's phrase, "carry in their hearts and 
brains the magic contained in words and can 
apply it to their fellow men" — men not of the 
sort that "darken counsel by words without 
knowledge," nor like the congressman of whom 
Speaker Reed said, "That man never speaks with- 
out subtracting something from the sum-total of 
human knowledge; we know less when he ends 
than we did when he began." 

The significance which Eucken, Bergson, and 
Noyes possess in common is that they are mes- 
sengers of the spirit and exponents of the spir- 
itual life, whose utterances are equivalent to 
beating the drum of eternity amid our absorbing 
secularities, and in the midst of an irreverent, 

304 



DEUM OF ETERNITY 305 

gainsaying, and profane generation calling on the 
Zeitgeist to lead in prayer. We may help our- 
selves to prize them and value their visit by 
reflecting how different and how disturbing 
would have been the effect if Europe had 
sent us three of its arch-unbelievers and 
scoffers, haters of religion and despisers of 
Christianity, to mock and flout the things of the 
spirit, to preach among us materialism's infi- 
nitely harmful no-gospel of dirt and despair; or 
had sent three of its reckless iconoclasts and 
rabid revolutionists to pour upon our American 
populace their violent, vicious, and virulent vo- 
cabularies, assailing the foundations of religion 
and morals, defying authority and government, 
and so menacing all order and security, political, 
social, and religious. Of these three ambassa- 
dors and advocates of the spirit, Eucken, Berg- 
son, and Noyes, the young poet appears quite 
worthy to stand with the two famous philoso- 
phers; being not without a clear, coherent, and 
creditable philosophy of his own akin to theirs, 
and seeming quite as well equipped for his sphere 
and service as they for theirs. 

That Alfred Noyes is not without significance, 
noteworthy and exceptional, has been certified in 
the estimate put upon his work by such judges 
as Kipling, Swinburne, Edmund Gosse, Theo- 
dore Watts-Dunton, and others similar, who, we 
are told, have rated him the most considerable 
English poet since Tennyson. 



306 THE OPEN FIRE 

His first public visit to this country served to 
make him and his significance more distinct and 
vivid to the American public ; and nothing in the 
closer view of the man himself detracted from 
the impression made previously by his works 
and by English indorsements. 

Since personal appearance counts for some- 
thing in revealing a man's significance, it may 
be noted to begin with that the whole look and 
bearing of this young athlete marked him as 
farthest possible from being an effeminate 
dreamer or dilettante. On his arrival here the 
newspapers sent their skilled reporters to "size 
him up" at his first public appearances and in 
private interviews. One wrote: "This square- 
jawed, close-cropped, clean-cut young man looks 
more like a fighter than like a poet." Another 
described him as "manifestly endowed with the 
heaped-up blessings of youth and health, the 
sturdy birthright of a Briton, a poet's mind, a 
taste for argument, a business sense, and the tact 
of a diplomatist" — undeniably an extraordinary 
assemblage of qualities and capacities to be found 
in the person of a young poet at the age of thirty- 
two. 

Those who met Alfred Noyes were struck with 
his quiet manner and unpretentious bearing, as 
natural and unaffected in his young manhood 
as his greatly simple and simply great fellow 
countryman Ambassador James Bryce, under his 
weight of years and honors. They were im- 



DRUM OF ETERNITY 307 

pressed with the clearness and force of the young 
poet's criticisms and the gentleness of his judg- 
ments; with his approachableness and readiness 
to converse, and with the modest candor of his 
replies to questions about himself and his work. 

When nine years old he awoke early one morn- 
ing and felt an impulse to write a poem, which 
he did. At fourteen he wrote an allegorical epic 
of thousands of lines, but did not publish it. At 
sixteen he had read practically all the English 
poets, liking best Shelley and Keats, and Words- 
worth and Tennyson, and Swinburne. His first 
printed poem was "The Symbolist,'' which ap- 
peared in the London Times when he was nine- 
teen and an Oxford undergraduate, achieving 
reputation as an athlete, but unknown in litera- 
ture. The fecund years since then have brought 
many volumes from his pen. At thirty-two he 
was the most widely popular of living English 
poets except Kipling. He caught even the college 
girls. The Barnard graduating class rendered 
his "Sherwood," a version of Robin Hood, on 
the college campus by moonlight and electricity. 

The significance of Alfred Noyes is not cryp- 
tic and esoteric, perceptible only to literary high- 
brows and experts, but so obvious and luminous 
as to give him a large popular vogue. His vigor, 
joyousness, and grace won the English-speak- 
ing world. Clayton Hamilton attributes this 
popularity to the fact that Noyes is healthy, 
happy, and young, and amplifies his statement as 



308 THE OPEN FIRE 

follows: "Mr. Noyes is thoroughly in love with 
life. He is productive because he is healthy ; and 
he is various because he is divinely capable of be- 
ing interested in a number of things. His health- 
iness of spirit is a boon for which to give thanks. 
Nothing is the matter with his body or his soul. 
In this age of morbid introspection he never 
looks upon himself to curse his fate. He never 
whines or whimpers. He religiously believes in 
being happy; and his triumphal youthfulness is 
a glorious challenge to the sort of maunderers 
who are forever saying, ^Ah! but wait till you 
have suffered !' His sense of tragedy is not mor- 
bid and lachrymose, but vigorous and terrible. 
After all the moanings and the caterwaulings of 
the sorry little singers, we have found at last a 
poet to whom this w^orld is not a twilit vale of 
tears, but a valley shimmering all dewy to the 
dawn, with a lark song over it." 

The sanity and earnestness of his writings 
compelled sober men to regard poetry not as the 
eccentric offgivings of a moonstruck imbecile, or 
the frothing of an epileptic fit, but as in his case 
the serious art of a sound-minded man capable of 
living and behaving like other men. He is em- 
phatically a man of pith and purpose, not one of 
those 

"Light half-believers of a casual creed. 
Who never deeply felt nor clearly willed, 
Who hesitate and falter life away." 

He sets himself with stout and indignant con- 



DRUM OF ETERNITY 309 

tradiction against those who see in man's exist- 
ence only 

"A life of nothings, nothing worth. 
From that first nothing ere his birth 
To that last nothing under earth." 

He sees in human existence a significance deep, 
high, and vast, and declares with Browning: 

"This world's no blot or blank; 
It means intensely and means good. 
To find its meaning is my meat and drink." 

As part of an author's or artist's self-revela- 
tion, it is always of interest to learn his per- 
sonal preference among his own works, to hear, 
for instance, from Hiram Powers that he chooses 
his Greek Slave, and from Thomas Ball that he 
likes his Eve best ; to be told that Maud was one 
of Tennyson's favorites, though we wonder why ; 
and to hear Edwin Markham confess that, on the 
whole, if he must choose, he would select his 
Semiramis, at which we do not wonder. So also 
we attend when Alfred Noyes, being questioned, 
answers, ^^I believe of all my longer and more 
ambitious efforts I like best 'The Flower of 
Japan' and 'The Forest of Wild Thyme.' '' Of 
these a judicious critic says : "They are generally 
conceded to be two of the purest flights of lyric 
verse ever written. They form a sequence, and 
are written about the adventures of a band of 
children in fairyland ; no ordinary fairyland, but 



310 THE OPEN FIRE 

a different fairyland conceived by Noyes' own 
brain, almost the quaintest, eeriest land o' 
dreams ever limned.'- 

Few things help so much to an understanding 
of any author and his work as to hear him read 
from his own productions ; the whole personality 
actively interpreting, vivifying, and enforcing 
the meaning through every tone and accent and 
inflection, every look and attitude and gesture; 
as in Tennyson's deep-voiced and impassioned 
renderings of his perfect poems to select friendly 
circles, or Dickens' public readings to crowded 
audiences from his works. "The Battle Hymn of 
the Republic" was never so stirring and affect- 
ing as when Julia Ward Howe recited it. Rich- 
ard Watson Gilder's quivering and tender read- 
ing of his own tribute at the Stedman memorial 
meeting gave to the lines a deeper pathos and 
more moving power. So also Alfred Noyes read- 
ing in public some of his own poems made us feel 
the force and urge of his peculiar personality 
surging in his verses, so that we knew the man 
better than ever before, and comprehended more 
fully the purpose and spirit and significance of 
his work. 

The English-speaking world, which has read 
his poems for a score of years, is ready to listen 
when he talks. Since Matthew Arnold's visit no 
English poet has spoken in America so interest- 
ingly or with so much intelligence, meaning, and 
fullness concerning literature, while it is proper 



DRUM OF ETERNITY 311 

and fair to say that he has shown himself to be 
a more sensible, civil, unpontifieal, unsupercil- 
ious, and altogether better behaving person than 
Arnold was. 

We are helped toward a correct apprehension 
and estimate of his significance in the literature 
of to-day by his clear and candid replies as to 
what he intends, what his aim and effort are; 
and this he does very directly and plainly. He 
talks as he writes, man-fashion. Prodded with 
questions as to his conception of the present-day 
mission of poetry, Noyes answered in his delib- 
erate, thoughtful way : "Poetry can have only one 
real mission and be genuine poetry, successful 
poetry. It is summed up in a line of Herman 
Hagedorn's, *Give us our gods again.' That is 
the whole keynote of the really great poetry of 
to-day, and the men who are doing work that is 
worth while are striving after that, consciously 
or unconsciously." The young poet broke off 
with a blush, but in a moment went on with a 
characteristic, slow, boyish smile : "You know it's 
awfully hard to talk on such a subject without 
seeming to be putting on a pious air. But I stick 
to the text I quoted a moment ago, ^Give us our 
gods again.' That's what people want, that's 
at the bottom of their cravings. I verily believe 
it is the reason for all these queer New Thought 
movements and strange sects that spring up 
among us like mushrooms or toadstools. My own 
work, I am aware, is pervaded by the spirit I 



312 THE OPEN FIRE 

have spoken of. Not that I strive to put it in ; I 
cannot honestly say that I do. I don't claim any 
credit for it. It gets into my work without ef- 
fort ; I suppose because it is a part of me. Some 
might attribute it to temperament. I dare say 
I summed it up pretty well in my poem called 
^The Origin of Life.' " The poem referred to ap- 
peared, when materialistic and atheistic views 
touching the nature and origin of life were being 
publicly aired in scientific circles in England. 
Alfred Noyes made answer in the London Daily 
Mail through the poem to which he now refers us 
for the keynote of his creed, and in which we 
may hear his tuning-fork giving the pitch for all 
this singer's music. 

His answer in that poem is like himself, direct, 
sincere, and sensible. He doubts and denies the 
atheistic dogma that all things that exist have 
sprung by chance out of original nothingness. 
He sees a significance in things which cannot be 
so accounted for to the human reason. He points 
to the significance of yon lighted city street, those 
towers that stand above it, that armored fleet, 
and all the triumphant achievements of the hu- 
man intellect in the marvels of material civiliza- 
tion, possibly not unworthy of notice by a su- 
preme Architect and Engineer of a universe. Is 
nothingness equal to producing them? He points 
to the significance of all the reverent "pageants 
of praise and prayer" which have made up hu- 
man worship through countless centuries, not 



DRUM OF ETERNITY 313 

unworthy the attention of an ever-adorable most- 
high God. Were they woven by chance out of 
nothing? The significance of "one little child 
with clasped hands praying" ; and of "one mar- 
tyr ringed with fire" : is it nothing? The signifi- 
cance of "one woman's lovelit face"? Did noth- 
ingness produce them all and put their meaning 
in them? Or are they meaningless? And the 
great and little hills: were they upheaved by 
nothing out of nothingness — including one 
named Olivet (O hush at the sound of that 
name!) with the significance of a quenchless 
Light lingering on its summit and an undying 
Voice echoing on its slopes! Can nothingness 
manipulated by chance account for all of this? 
Having thus applied, in a way that appeals to 
the common sense of most, the reductio ad dbsur- 
dum to their teachings, or at least to compulsory 
corollaries and inevitable inferences therefrom, 
Alfred Noyes advises these scientists, searching 
back to the beginning of things, to put off their 
shoes from off their feet, because, for serious and 
reverent men, the ground is holy; he suggests 
that they would better kneel on the spot where 
they have denied; he summons them to help re- 
kindle faith in the minds of faithless men by ac- 
knowledging that what they found at the end of 
that dark road they trod back to the primal or- 
igin of all things was "In the beginning God." 
He thinks the account of the creation in Genesis 
the greatest poetry ever written, poetry saturate 



314 THE OPEN FIRE 

with the sublimest truth. Poetry is not some- 
thing that is not true; it is the noblest possible 
statement of essential truth and fact. 

In gentle and temperate fashion this earnest 
young poet proceeds : "In critical circles in Eng- 
land such disposition to negation and revolt pre- 
vails that it is impossible to speak in terms of 
faith or of optimistic affirmation without arous- 
ing shrill and strident contradiction. So revo- 
lutionary are these British critics that they ex- 
press surprise that Milton and Browning are still 
read in America and Shakespeare considered 
worthy of occasional perusal and that you have 
not thrown Tennyson to the scrap heap. Many 
present-day poets, not content with seizing the 
Muse's torch from the hands of their predeces- 
sors and belaboring them over the nose with it, 
go on to throw the torch in the gutter, and often 
find themselves with a meaningless splutter of 
epigrammatic squibs, which do not illuminate, 
but merely burn their fingers." Commenting on 
this, an American newspaper remarks this same 
tendency of the literary mob here as in England 
to "throw away the Muse's torch and go danc- 
ing the turkey trot down the centuries in an unil- 
luminating and sulphurous blaze of firecrackers 
and Bengal lights." By throwing himself with 
his whole force against all this, Alfred Noyes 
adds strength to literature and dignity to his own 
name. Concerning the weakening and destruc- 
tive effect of negation and unfaith, Professor 



DRUM OF ETERNITY 315 

Richardson, of Dartmouth, justly says: "Nega- 
tion, whether it be right or wrong, tends to eat 
into literary product and to corrode reputation. 
So George Eliot, with a hundred merits, is an 
author of dwindling fame, while Dickens, with a 
hundred faults, rules with a broader sway than 
ever.'' 

Alfred Noyes remarks on the unsteadiness and 
insecurity of unhopeful and negative views and 
the self-contradictions of the pessimists: "One 
of the most peculiar things about the men who 
try to write poetry that echoes the cynical, skep- 
tical, pessimistic note is their inability to main- 
tain consistency and the way they contradict 
themselves. For example, take Hardy : the best 
things he has ever done are the fresh, sponta- 
neous, cheerful lyrics that breathe trust and an 
admission of the beneficent Unknown, of a great 
invisible Something that is good as well as all 
powerful. And this is the essence of optimism. 
Nearly all the poets of negation — even Shelley, 
who called himself an atheist and was expelled 
from Oxford University for it — have postulated 
bigger things than they denied. Shelley lived to 
write one of the most triumphant confessions of 
faith ever penned." 

In further exposition of his idea of the mission 
of poetry Alfred Noyes goes on to say that he 
looks to poetry to bring to men a renewed sense 
of totality, to get the everyday, prosaic, common- 
place fact in its proper place in the vast scheme 



316 THE OPEN FIRE 

of things in relation to the eternal ; to coordinate 
man and his life with the basic harmony which 
proceeds from the central Source of all things, 
by unity with which all our discords can be re- 
solved; to insist tha4: reason, and not madness, 
concord, and not discord, reigns. In a universe 
which is itself rhythmic and metrical, poetry 
should regulate the cadences, inflections, and 
surges of the human soul into harmony corre- 
sponding with cosmic movements — with swing- 
ing tides and circling stars, and all the peri- 
odicities of nature, the intermissions and recur- 
rences, the seasons and successions, alternations, 
oscillations, and balancings, lapses and recur- 
rences, the licit ebb and flow, surgings and sub- 
sidings, systole and diastole, inspirations and ex- 
pirations, which give to the breathing, throbbing 
cosmos something like meter and rhyme and 
rhythm. ^^Throughout the universe,'' he says, 
^^the smallest break in the eternal order and 
harmony is an immeasurable vacuum of the kind 
that both art and science abhor ; for, if we admit 
it, the universe has no meaning. The poet de- 
manding that not a worm should be cloven in 
vain, or crying with Blake that a robin in a cage 
shakes heaven with anger, is at one with that 
profound truth — a sparrow shall not fall to the 
ground without our Father's knowledge. The 
blades of the grass are all numbered. There is no 
break in the roll of that harmony 'whereto the 
worlds beat time,' and it is because great art 



DRUM OF ETERNITY 317 

brings out, as a conductor with a wand, the har- 
monies hidden by the noise and jar of daily af- 
fairs, that in poetry, as time goes on, our race 
will come to find an ever surer and surer stay. 
A certain carping philosophy which poets will 
always resent denies this harmony and sees in 
the creation of this earth a mere accident, or 
the mistake of an eyeless blunderer, a hideous, 
blood-stained monster, a grinning jester. The 
poetry that shall dominate the next age will have 
nothing to do with such a spirit. All great poe- 
try brings us in touch with the harmony which 
is the basis of the universe.'- Thus Alfred Noyes 
beats the drum of Eternity. 

Resuming his talk about the proper business 
of the true poet, he says: "Poetry's mission 
should be to consecrate all life, to pour on every 
sphere of human action what Wordsworth calls 
*the light that never was on sea or land,' and give 
to everything that touch of consecration which 
is every true poet's dream." "It may sound ludi- 
crous," says Mr. Noyes, "to say that, if a poet 
writes about a. modern skyscraper, his mission is 
to consecrate the skyscraper; but so it is never- 
theless." Yes, surely. And that is what that 
brilliant boy Frederic Lawrence Knowles did in 
his lofty verses, "To a Modern Office Building," 
which Alfred Noyes would seem to have had in 
mind. 

Buoyancy and joyousness may well be empha- 
sized as elements in the significance and charm 



318 THE OPEN FIRE 

of Alfred Noyes. Agnosticism and negation 
have no Te Deums and Hallelujah Choruses, 
nothing to be jubilant about, not music enough 
to make even one small cricket elate. With Ten- 
nyson and Browning gone and the major key 
sunk to the minor, and the rasping voice of the 
pessimist jarring the air, it was high time for a 
real musician like Alfred Noyes, in whom God 
once more sent a bugler with heart and lungs and 
lips to make the bugle give its proper golden cry, 
and to put courage into the hearts of men. In 
the disbelieving and blaspheming camp of the 
sour and sulky pessimists there is weeping and 
wailing and gnashing of teeth, or would be if they 
were consistent. At any rate, they set our teeth 
on edge as with the filing of a saw. "What do you 
miss most?" was asked of Lucifer, some time out 
of heaven. "The sound of the trumpet in the 
morning," answered he, down amid the dolor of a 
sinning and suffering earth. When Alfred Noyes 
puts the slughorn to his mouth and blows, we 
hear a trumpet that has the sound of morning in 
it. He rather than Swinburne, to whom the title 
was given, deserves to be called "the trumpet of 
days that darken." 

The great Victorians — Browning and Tenny- 
son — sang faith, hope, and love to the nineteenth 
century in a period which Ernest Hello described 
as "having desire without light, curiosity with- 
out wisdom, seeking God by strange ways, ways 
traced by the blind, and offering rash incense 



DRUM OF ETERNITY 319 

upon the high places to an unknown God, who is 
the God of darkness.'' While those two great 
Victorians lived there was plenty of noble and 
heartening poetry in England. When they were 
gone, Frederic W. H. Myers, himself no mean 
poet (witness his lofty and ever-memorable 
"Saint PauP'), said: "There is no future for 
English verse. English poetry has come to an 
end." If it seemed so then it does not seem 
so now, for alone by himself Alfred Noyes is 
enough to dispel that gloomy view. And he be- 
lieves with Matthew Arnold that the future of 
poetry is immense, "because in poetry which is 
worthy of its high destiny our race as time goes 
on will come to feel a surer and ever surer stay." 
We have done little more than dwell upon a 
single phase of the significance of Alfred Noyes ; 
but it is the phase which we count most interest- 
ing and important. From our point of view the 
highest value of his undeniable charm is that it 
has power to gain the attention of a world now 
sorely in need of the spirit and the truth which 
suffuse and vitalize his poetry. 



A VETERAN MISSIONARY^ 

Why are we here? John Burroughs deifies 
Walt Whitman. We are Christians and not 
pagans; we do not deify any man. If this cele- 
bration were simply for the glorification of 
James M. Thoburn, he would hold up his hand in 
horror and in protest. If he were to speak to us 
here this afternoon, I think he would suggest 
that we join together in that refrain of the sweet 
and holy German hymn, "Let Jesus Christ be 
praised." 

We are here to rejoice in a conspicuous illus- 
tration of what Jesus Christ can do with the 
man and the life wholly surrendered to his con- 
trol. And its lesson, especially to the students 
of this college, is: Consecrate your life, fling it 
away in splendid abandon for Christ and the 
world, and see what will come of it for you in the 
fifty years ahead. It is for us to realize more 
fully through this celebration the ineffable ma- 
jesty, the immeasurable power, the imperishable 
grandeur of Christian ideals and Christian serv- 
ice. If this be not the result, the whole pro- 
gram will be a profitless performance. 

We are here to nail a few epithets upon the 
name of Thoburn, to call him some names indic- 

^Address at the jubilee celebration of Bishop James M. 
Thoburn, Allegheny College, Meadville, Pa. 

320 



A VETERAN MISSIONARY 321 

ative of our thoughts about him and our feel- 
ings toward him. 

I begin by calling him an enthusiast. I go to 
my dictionary for the meaning of the word, and 
Webster's first definition of an enthusiast is one 
who thinks himself divinely inspired, possessed 
of some special revelation. And for proof of the 
propriety of calling him an enthusiast I refer you 
to the September, 1906, number of the Methodist 
Review, in which you will find an article entitled 
"Inspiration" written by J. M. Thoburn. In that 
article he tells how as a missionary again and 
again he has felt himself to be. directly inspired 
by God, has felt in his soul that he had a special 
revelation from him, not to be foisted upon the 
church or forced upon his brethren for their 
guidance, but absolutely peremptory for him in 
the marking out of his own plans and the choos- 
ing of his course. Thus has he lived his life and 
done his work, seeking guidance from God and 
getting it This is notorious. Therefore, under 
that first definition of Webster, I charge that this 
man is one of the most magnificent enthusiasts 
ever produced in the history of Christianity. 

And the second definition is like unto the first 
in its fitness and applicability, for by that defini- 
tion an enthusiast is one whose mind is wholly 
possessed and heated by what engages it. And 
I ask you, who know men, whether that does not 
describe James M. Thoburn. Has he not been 
wholly engaged and heated by the great work 



322 THE OPEN FIRE 

in which he has been engaged? I am reminded 
of that divine Enthusiast who set aside all claims 
of relationship and all other interests and said, 
"Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's 
business?'' — and of that later enthusiast who 
said, "I am determined to know nothing among 
men save Jesus Christ and him crucified. This 
one thing I do. I count all things else as dung." 

A splendid enthusiast, surely, under* both def- 
initions of the word, is this missionary bishop of 
India. 

I trust I shall not desecrate this place nor vio- 
late the proprieties of this occasion if I say, in 
a sense the appropriateness of which will appear 
in a moment, I trust, that I have figured him in 
my mind as a plunger. Years ago when he was 
a young man I am told he was not an admirer 
of Browning and not a believer in his great- 
ness. But one day in Singapore when weary, 
if not sick, he was lying down and resting; and 
Dr. H. C. Stuntz, who was with him, began 
to read to him parts of "Paracelsus." The 
Bishop listened until the reader reached that 
great passage about the pearl diver in which he 
says, "Are there not two points in the adven- 
ture of a diver, one when, a beggar, he prepares 
to plunge, one when, a prince, he rises with his 
pearl? Festus, I plunge." And the listening 
Bishop exclaimed: "Brother, I have done that 
many a time. I have plunged." 

There are more points than two in the adven- 



A VETERAN MISSIONARY 323 

ture of a diver. This man knows that in his own 
personal experience. He has known what it is to 
stand alone, stripped of all secular ambitions, 
all thought of selfish advantage, naked of worldly 
resources, and plunge into the sunless depths of 
heathenism. He knows the experience of the 
diver as he gropes along the bottom in the mud 
and mire and slime of heathenism, feeling for 
pearls, immortal, unspeakably precious pearls. 
He knows the feeling of the diver when he closes 
his clutch upon the treasures of the deep; he 
knows the joy of the diver when he comes up 
out of the suffocation and the darkness and the 
mire and holds his pearl aloft in the face of 
heaven and the light of day. And in this man's 
case, when he plunged into the depths and came 
up with his treasures, it was not one pearl but, 
first and last, hundreds and thousands of pearls. 
This is what I mean when I call him a plunger. 
Empty-handed he plunged. He disappeared 
from sight. He stayed down a long time, some- 
times. He was gone for years and we did not 
see him. But when he came back it was with his 
hands full of pearls. He knows what it is to 
make the grim plunge into dark depths and what 
it is to rise radiant, with his gleaming treasure. 
I will call him a typical Christian product. 
The proof of Christianity is its products, in men, 
women, institutions, policies. Christianity, like 
Paul before Agrippa, is glad of the privilege any- 
where to speak for itself, to make its argument 



324 THE OPEN FIRE 

and present its proof, and everywhere, before the 
throne of reason, in the court of science, in the 
halls of culture and the seats of the mighty, it 
invites the sharpest criticism. Especially in the 
presence of the heathen faiths it says, "I count 
myself happy that I am permitted to answer for 
myself." 

And it produces its proofs in its products — 
men. The Christian Church in America had 
such men as Thoburn to send to India, such men 
as Bashford and Lewis to go to China, such men 
as Hartzell to go to Africa, with thousands and 
thousands like them, first and last, to go to the 
darkened nations of the earth — Christian states- 
men, Christian heroes, willing to toil terribly for 
the uplift of the nations and the glory of Christ, 
willing to lay down their lives in long labor or 
in sudden sacrifice, as the Master may demand. 

Christ's products are seen in institutions also. 
Bishop Thoburn, you know better than I do, and 
your confidence in the prediction is stronger than 
mine intelligently can be, that the day will come 
when India, looking upon our institutions 
planted there by Christianity, will say: "The 
God that sends relief from famine, the God that 
builds asylums, that makes the deaf to hear, the 
blind to see, the lame to walk, through the benefi- 
cent and skillful ministry of Christian physi- 
cians, the God that sprinkles our land with 
schools to enlighten our darkness and elevate our 
degradation, the God that makes such a man as 



A VETERAN MISSIONARY 325 

John F. Goucher to plant and sustain a hundred 
and more schools in the villages of India, along 
with his monumental educational work, recog- 
nized by decorations from the governments of 
China and Japan, the God who as years go on 
raises up generation after generation of such men 
as these — the God that answereth by orphanages, 
let him be God! Yea, let the God of Christian 
institutions be our Gx)d forever and ever" ! That 
is the cry that will sound all over India and other 
non-Christian lands in the day of the Lord. 

In policies also Christianity has proofs to offer. 
Why is it that America stands to-day foremost 
in the eyes of the world among Christian na- 
tions? Because her policies toward the peoples 
of the world are more Christian than those of 
any other nation. What the United States has 
done in and for Cuba, what the United States 
has done and is doing in and for the Philippines, 
what the United States has done in and for 
China; what John Hay, a Christian statesman, 
the foremost diplomat and statesman of his time 
in all the world, did for diplomacy between na- 
tions when he made frankness and candor and 
openness and absolute truthfulness the rule and 
practice in diplomacy, instead of concealment 
and duplicity and trickery and intrigue; when 
he demonstrated that the Golden Rule of Jesus 
Christ is applicable and supremely wise in the 
affairs of nations as in the affairs of individuals ; 
when he thus presented to the world the spectacle 



326 THE OPEN FIRE 

of a Christian product in his own person and in 
the nation he represented — all this strengthened 
magnificently the evidences of Christianity. 
No wonder that a prominent official in one 
of the western provinces of China issued a proc- 
lamation in which he commended to the people of 
his province the Christian religion, the religion 
that could produce Americans who, having a 
great sum of money from the Chinese nation in 
their hands as an indemnity, all uncompelled and 
even unasked returned into the hands of China a 
large part of that indemnity. Such a national 
policy toward other nations presents evidences 
of Christianity which will irresistibly conquer 
the world. 

One more epithet. I would call Bishop Tho- 
burn a Christian field marshal. What, that gen- 
tle, mild-mannered, soft-voiced, and decidedly un- 
military-looking man, a field marshal! Yes, a 
soldier and a general for Jesus Christ. Years 
ago there died in Switzerland an old man who 
told as the most memorable event of his boyhood 
that once he had strayed into the French camp 
and had seen Napoleon Bonaparte down on his 
knees studying the map of Europe on a drum 
head. A significant sight, surely, for the peo- 
ples of Europe, when such a man as he goes to 
studying the map of Europe on a drum head! 
He was planning to roll that drum across the 
width of that map. He was studying the situa- 
tion of the countries, for he meant to put his 



A VETERAN MISSIONARY 327 

armies in their capitals. He was tracing the 
boundaries of the kingdoms, for he meant to push 
his drum against them and shove them this way 
and that according to his own greedy wish and 
his own mighty will. Forty years ago in India 
you might have seen a frail, slender young man 
laying the map of India alongside his open Bible. 
He too was bent on conquest. He meant to do 
what he could to carry that Word of Life across 
the width of that Indian map, east and west, 
north and south. I call him as great a marshal 
in his purpose and insatiable longing for con- 
quest in the Christian empire as Napoleon was 
in the military conquest of Europe. A Christian 
field marshal surely this man has been. 

I said this celebration brings us here not to 
glorify a man, but to glorify Jesus Christ, who 
made him what he is and helped him to do what 
he has done. And I would like the privilege for 
just one moment of holding up Jesus Christ be- 
fore these young people who are here, in order 
that, if possible, the glowing incandescence of 
this man^s devotion may be kindled in you, and 
that Allegheny College, so honored in her sons 
and daughters in the past, may send forth from 
her doors to the ends of the earth many messen- 
gers of light who will carry the saving knowledge 
of Jesus Christ to the perishing nations. 

On the first day I ever spent on English soil 
I heard the great Mr. Spurgeon address a con- 
vention of Baptist clergymen. His subject was 



328 THE OPEN FIRE 

Jesus Christ, and the charge to his fellow minis- 
ters was that they should rouse themselves and 
lose themselves in Christ, that they should spend 
themselves unreservedly and passionately in his 
service. And he closed by reciting some of the 
words from Macaulay's poem where before the 
battle of Ivry the soldiers said concerning Henry 
of Navarre, their king and leader : 

"The king is come to marshal us, in all his armor drest; 
And he has bound a snow-white plume upon his gallant 

crest. 
Right graciously he smiled on us, as rolled from wing to 

wing, 
Down all our line, a deafening shout: 'God save our lord 

the king!'" 

And then King Henry, speaking to his army, 
said : 

" 'And if my standard-hearer fall, as fall full well he may, 
For never saw I promise yet of such a bloody fray. 
Press where ye see my white plume shine amidst the 

ranks of war. 
And be your oriflamme to-day the helmet of Navarre.' " 

And then Spurgeon held up Christ as the divine 
Captain, the leader who goes forth to certain 
conquest, who should kindle our souls and our 
devotion a thousandfold more than any human 
leader that ever called men to his standard. 

Dear young people, rich and fine with the 
learning of the schools and the discipline of 
training, now, when the call is sounding, 

"The Son of God goes forth to war: 
Who follows in his train?'* 



A VETERAN MISSIONARY 329 

summon your whole being— "body, soul, and 
spirit,'' as the old knights used to say— to re- 
spond, 

"Be swift, my soul, to answer Him! 
Be jubilant, my feet!" 



HUMILITY 

The New Testament is the textbook of humil- 
ity. Whoso undertakes to live by it must be 
willing to be humble-hearted. About this there 
is no room for dispute. Our Lord and Saviour 
said : "Learn of me ; for I am meek and lowly of 
heart." And again: "Whosoever shall humble 
himself as a little child, the same is greatest in 
the kingdom of heaven." The children of this 
world are out of sympathy with such teachings. 
That wild genius, Nietzsche, saved us the trouble 
of branding him as an immoralist by calling him- 
self by that name. In addition his vanity 
prompted him to claim to be "the great immoral- 
ist," wherein his vanity led him astray, there be- 
ing numerous persons in prison and out of it 
who easily exceeded Nietzsche in the actual per- 
petration of immorality. Denouncing the Chris- 
tian virtues in general, he particularly declared 
humility to be a mean, unmanly, pusillanimous, 
and contemptible trait, the mark of a weak na- 
ture. In so saying he illustrated the universal 
truth that whoso contradicts Jesus Christ on 
matters of which he spoke is a fool as well as a 
blasphemer. Nietzsche's topsy-turvy brain con- 
structed an inverted moral cosmogony, stood the 
universe on its head, wrenched reason and con- 

330 



HUMILITY 331 

science and truth asunder, and made "a mad 
world, my masters,'^ before he was himself car- 
ried to the madhouse. There is no reason why 
we should take a lunatic's lucubrations very seri- 
ously; yet his bitter antagonism to Christ and 
Christian teaching affords fresh proof that the 
carnal mind, the spirit of this world, is enmity 
against God. A fair exhibition of Nietzsche's 
temper was in his saying that if any gods what- 
ever existed, he could not possibly endure not 
to be a god himself. He never would consent 
that any being should be greater than he was. 
"Therefore," he reasoned, "there cannot be any 
God or gods," which reasoning seems to have 
satisfied his own mind, but is far from convinc- 
ing to the rest of mankind. The natural effect of 
the supernatural gospel, the work of Christ in 
the hearts of men, is to make them humble and 
keep them so. Bishop H. H. Montgomery, secre- 
tary of the Society for the Propagation of the 
Gospel in Foreign Parts, himself English to the 
core, speaking of the effect of the gospel upon the 
English race, says : "The Englishman does not 
see God easily. It is hard for him not to be an 
agnostic. It is one of the marvels of history that 
our English race has become an apostle and 
herald of the faith. We do not lack fiber, but 
more than any other race we need a broken heart ; 
and that fracture was effected by the power of 
the gospel." 

Broken-heartedness and humility are endan- 



332 THE OPEN FIRE 

gered by prosperity and success, prominence and 
power ; and the loss of them means deterioration 
in the man himself and probably in the quality 
of his products. Dr. John Brown, the wise Edin- 
burgh physician, referring to the danger of ela- 
tion and inflation from popularity, says: "Gen- 
erally speaking, a man should stand in doubt of 
himself when he is very popular. He should sus- 
pect that there must be some bit of quackery 
about him. Few things are more disorganizing 
to the intellect and to the moral sense, or more 
likely to develop the hump and deform the man, 
than that open-mouthed readiness on the part of 
the public to take anything from some men and 
to applaud everything they say. No man's great- 
est was ever brought forth under such conditions, 
or in the intoxicating atmosphere of popularity 
and adulation." 

When self-complacency takes the place of 
humility beauty of character is blemished and 
tarnished. Bishop Wiley and a friend, walking 
along a city street, paused in front of a photog- 
rapher's window to look at the picture of a noted 
preacher. Both agreed that it was lifelike. As 
they resumed their walk Bishop Wiley perti- 
nently remarked in his cool, quiet way : "I have 
long had three wishes. One is that I might have 
five months of perfect health; another is that 
I might have five weeks of perfect rest; and the 
third is that I might have five minutes of perfect 
satisfaction with myself — ^just to know how it 



HUMILITY 333 

feels.'' The gentle irony of the last clause in the 
Bishop's remark means that self-complacency is 
not a grace of character nor an admirable condi- 
tion of mind. Loss of humility leaves one a prey 
to vanity which sometimes swells to grotesque 
proportions. William Winter tells of a notori- 
ously egotistical clergyman concerning whom it 
was said, when inquiry was made as to what that 
self-satisfied ecclesiastic was doing, "He is wait- 
ing for a vacancy in the Trinity." There have 
been persons who wore such an absurdly lofty air 
as to recall "Rule Forty-two" which the King in 
Alice^s Adventures in Wonderland read from his 
book : "All persons more than a mile high must 
leave the court." It is easy to smile at egregious 
vanity, for its antics often contribute to the 
gayety of nations ; but in reality it is no laughing 
matter; it rots the roots of character and often 
becomes a vice in morals. Moreover, it invites 
and frequently bodes disaster. He who carries 
a high head and rides a high horse is probably 
riding for a fall. History is full of illustrations. 
The downfall of Cicero from his pinnacle of in- 
fluence in Rome is thus touched upon by Macau- 
lay : "The vice of egotism was rapidly growing on 
Cicero. He had attained the highest point of 
power which he ever reached, and his head was 
undoubtedly a little turned by his elevation. Af- 
terward this vile habit tainted his speaking and 
writing, so as to make much of his finest rhetoric 
almost disgusting. On all occasions he gave him- 



334 THE OPEN FIRE 

self airs which, as Plutarch tells us, made him 
generally odious and were the real cause of his 
banishment from Rome/' Cicero's speech on be- 
half of the poet Archias, a magnificent enco- 
mium, was so blemished by insufferable egotism 
that Macaulay cries out: "What unhappy mad- 
ness led Cicero always to talk of himself? He 
was really mad with vanity." And, largely be- 
cause of this, darkness and impending danger 
were gathering around Cicero. 

A plain American was waiting at the railway 
station at Geneva, Switzerland, when the Shah 
of Persia, Nasr-Ed-Din, rode up in a carriage 
guarded by armed postilions and outriders to 
take the train. His face was the most imperious 
and despotic ever seen — like that of a tyrant 
accustomed to take men's heads off with a look. 
As he stepped upon the station platform he 
passed within three feet of the American. The lat- 
ter did not step back, but stood rather more erect 
than usual, and looked calmly into the haughty 
and almost menacing eyes of the monarch, think- 
ing within himself, "The ruler who carries such 
a face as that invites assassination" — which was 
the fate that finally overtook that Shah. 

If it be true that popularity and high position 
endanger a man's humility, it is also true that 
humbleness of heart is all the more needful for 
filling such a position well, and if the voters or 
appointers could prediscern which man of ability 
was sane enough and steady enough- and sweet- 



HUMILITY 335 

souled enough to retain his humility after eleva- 
tion, he is the man whom they would exalt. It is 
also true that humility is possible in the highest 
place; and if any man occupying such a place 
wishes to crown his other qualifications with the 
one superlative grace which will win divine ap- 
proval and compel the homage of human love, let 
him kneel on the height where he has been placed 
and pray to heaven for a humble heart. 

In Lake Maggiore, Italy, on one of the Borro- 
mean Islands is an old palace the striking fea- 
ture of which is the word "Humilitas,'' lettered 
large on all parts of the building, without and 
within. A palatial villa blazoned with "Humil- 
ity" strikes the tourist as an incongruity. But 
a sweet and humble spirit is sometimes found in 
high places; and lowly station is no guarantee 
against a morose, overbearing, and domineering 
spirit. Matthew Simpson was noted for sweet- 
ness of nature and gentleness of manner. The 
near friends of Edward G. Andrews caught every 
now and then a glimpse of the genuine humility 
of his inmost heart. Both these men were exact- 
ing toward themselves and had deep reverence 
for their work ; the modesty of great ability and 
of noble nature was exemplified in them. Bishop 
Andrews, though the most orderly and accurate 
of bishops, when once a slight mistake in one of 
his reports was pointed out to him, saw it at a 
glance, and with chagrin on his face, and a tone 
of impatience at himself in his voice, said, "That 



336 THE OPEN FIRE 

shows what a fool I am." So solemn was his 
sense of responsibility for doing his work well 
that he flogged himself for any imperfection 
therein. Men knew him to be very capable and 
very careful; but he told of his blunders. A 
most discerning sentence in the Episcopal Ad- 
dress at the General Conference of 1908 speaks 
of Bishop Andrews as being "held in high esteem 
for the qualities in which he thought himself 
deficient." He was held in high esteem for pure 
and fervent piety, and his brethren were so sure 
of him in this that his frequent "Amen" was an 
uplift and reenforcement to them when they 
prayed or preached in his presence; but he es- 
teemed others better than himself, and wished he 
could be as good as his brethren — of like spirit 
with another who said, "I try to be as pious as 
I can, but am careful not to imagine myself to 
be more pious than my brethren." Bishop An- 
drews was held in high esteem for wisdom, but he 
had been heard to call himself a fool. He was 
held in high esteem for good judgment as to men 
and things, but he thought his judgment must 
be very poor, because men and things sometimes 
turned out different from his expectations and 
predictions. He was held in high esteem as being 
learned in law and history and precedent and in 
other things, but he regarded himself as only a 
student, not a master; and he died learning. 
When past eighty and on the retired list, he still 
kept alert watch for the best new books and kept 



HUMILITY 337 

on buying them with the eager thirst of a young 
preacher. One summer day in our New York 
bookstore, looking over the newest books, he 
caught sight of Dr. W. M. Ramsay's portly vol- 
ume on the Epistles to the Seven Churches in 
Asia, The price was three dollars, no discount 
allowed, and he on half salary. He glanced 
through it, fondled it, and said: "I don't see 
how I can afford it, but I must have it." And he 
lugged it ofe, with that deliciously guilty feeling 
which a minister has when he knows he has com- 
mitted the crime of extravagance in buying 
books. His colleagues called him "a wonderful 
man," but when this came to his ears he said, 
quite sharply : "O, pshaw !" 

Self-excusing is a vicious habit, due to fond 
love and a want of true humility. The Flagel- 
lants of the Middle Ages were fanatics doubt- 
less, but they had sense enough to whip them- 
selves for their sins and faults and not to blame 
their failures on something or somebody else. 
We are too ready to lay the blame of our mis- 
takes and shortcomings on circumstances, on our 
fellow men, on our wives, or even sometimes on 
God, as did the little girl who sat by the table 
under the evening lamp working with a dis- 
tressed face at her arithmetic lesson for to-mor- 
row, and who, when asked what was the matter, 
replied: "I can't do my sums, and I've asked 
God to help me, and he's made three mistakes al- 
ready." Shakespeare has difficulty in persuad- 



838 THE OPEN FIRE 

ing us that "it is not in our stars but in our- 
selves that we are underlings." The wisest word 
said by Hamilton* W. Mabie at a dinner given in 
his honor by the University Club in New York 
was this : "I have always heard that a man is in 
the sanest attitude toward life when he charges 
his failures straight home to himself, to his lack 
of vision, his lack of grasp, his lack of continuity 
and persistence, his lack of character; and that, 
in taking account of his successes, if he have 
any, he ought to recognize humbly how much he 
may have owed to propitious circumstances, to 
the helpful favor of his fellow men, and to the 
unmerited mercy of Divine Providence/^ On the 
other hand, in explaining the successes of other 
men we need to beware of supposing them to be 
due to accident or good luck or favoritism on the 
part of God. It has been well said that when 
you see a man w ho has achieved eminent success, 
you may be sure it is not due to good luck, but 
because he has persistently used means of self- 
discipline which the average man neglects. 

"The heights by great men reached and kept 

Were not attained by sudden flight; 

But they, while their companions slept, 

Were toiling upward in the night." 

Blessed is the man who guards against self-com- 
placency, who deals austerely with himself, plays 
the part of stern schoolmaster toward his powers, 
and drives his nature with a firm will, making 
his faculties feel "the curb that eralls and the 



HUMILITY 339 

lash that falls and the sting of the roweled steel.'' 
The moment of self-indulgence is the moment 
of unworthiness and peril. 

Kipling somewhere speaks of a soldier learn- 
ing to count his regiment a holy thing; which 
means that the man comes to worship his part 
in the regiment and his obligation to it with 
every drop of his blood, and is ready to bleed 
his veins empty on any field in service of the 
cause in which his regiment is enlisted. Lack of 
deep reverence for and real devotion to his regi- 
ment and his work is the secret of the inefBciency 
of many and the decline and downfall of some. 
One morning, in a General Conference session, 
two members of a certain delegation spied a man 
of rather lofty bearing sitting uninvited on the 
platform near the bishops. The man was then 
without a church and on the supernumerary list 
because of his unwillingness to accept what the 
appointing power could give him. Once in his 
life he was pastor of a famous church in a great 
and beautiful city. The devil tempted him to 
infer that he himself must be great and beauti- 
ful too or he would not be in such a place; and 
consulting his self-consciousness the man found 
that it confirmed the devil's suggestion. That 
was, practically, the end of his ministry, as the 
cunning devil meant it should be. After that 
the man virtually said to the appointing powers: 
"I will accept another pastorate, if you will offer 
me one worthy of so great a man as I know my- 



340 THE OPEN FIRE 

self to be. Otherwise, gentlemen, I will not con- 
descend to preach the everlasting gospel to a lost 
world any more." Thenceforth the church had 
no place to offer that was up to his demands. 
Said one General Conference delegate to his 
neighbor, looking at the tall, erect, imposing 
figure on the platform: "How is it that the 
church has no place for that man?" "Because 
lordliness is not wanted anywhere," was the re- 
ply. Puffed up with vanity and a sense of his 
own dignity, a lordly feeling had taken posses- 
sion of the man; and all humility, all reverence 
for the sanctity of his high commission, all sense 
of the hallowed glory of the privilege of being, 
with Paul, the slave of Jesus Christ for the sav- 
ing of the souls for whom Christ died, had de- 
parted from him ; and with these went by degrees 
all fear of God. To quote from the "Idylls of the 
King," "He was up so high in pride, that he was 
half way down the slope to hell." Never again 
did he deign to honor the Lord Christ by making 
a business of proclaiming his message to a lost 
world. He himself joined the lost world. 
Through years utterly secularized and filled with 
deterioration of character and deepening disre- 
pute, his career declined to an end too scandal- 
ous and too tragic to relate. All because his 
foolish heart grew proud. Even a little lowli- 
ness of mind and reverence for the Master and 
his work would have saved him. If he had 
kept humbly and loyally at his blessed task, 



HUMILITY 341 

gladly preaching the gospel and ministering to 
immortal souls wherever Providence and the 
church assigned him, as thousands of greater 
and better men than he have done, all would 
have been well; he might have lived in the odor 
of sanctity and died lamented. But he sulked 
in the tent of his pride and went no more forth 
to the battle. He took no more orders from the 
Captain of Salvation who had done him the 
enormous honor of calling him to the ministry 
in the days of his youth. He became a recreant, 
a deserter, and a traitor. He turned his back 
on his Lord, and Christ had to let go of him; 
after that, shame and the outer darkness. And 
the pity of it is that it was all so foolish, unnec- 
essary, inexcusable, willful, and wanton. This 
unhappy apostate might just as easily have been 
happy, if only, instead of listening to the devil 
who prompted him to demand a position equal 
to his own conception of his powers, he had lis- 
tened to the words of Phillips Brooks : "Do not 
pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger men. 
Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; 
pray for powers equal to your tasks. Then the 
doing of your work shall be no miracle, but you 
shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder 
at yourself, at the richness of life which has 
come to you by the grace of God." Or if he had 
not ceased to read the Bible which lay on his 
study table and from which he had preached for 
years, the faithful old Book would have admon- 



342 THE OPEN FIRE 

ished him that "pride goeth before destruction 
and a haughty spirit before a fall," and that "a 
man's pride shall bring him low, but honor shall 
uphold the humble in spirit." 

Dr. Stephen Paget tells of a famous physician 
who lived to be seventy-five — longer than was 
quite agreeable, and longer than he really de- 
sired. For years he was retired from practice by 
age and infirmities, and those years seemed 
empty and irksome to him ; but in retirement he 
was comforted always by the thought that he 
had tried to do his best, had worked hard and 
close, had neglected no opportunity for service, 
and had never swerved from his life-purpose. 
He mourned the end of his work; it seemed to 
him like a funeral. But when his beloved work 
died, he rejoiced that his work and he had never 
in all the years been at variance; he had never 
quarreled with his work. He had loved, cher- 
ished, and honored it, and had clung to it so 
long as he had strength. He used to say that 
oftentimes, when thinking of his work, sentences 
of the marriage service would run in his head; 
and he would find himself saying to his work. 
With my body I thee worship — till death us do 
part — / take thee only unto me so long as we 
both shall live. And there had never been a cross 
word between him and his work for all the forty 
years. With body and soul he had worshiped 
his work. That fact was very dear to him, and, 
now that his work was ended, he consoled him- 



HUMILITY 343 

self with that precious memory. Every doctor, 
if he lives long enough (every minister, too), 
must attend the funeral of his work. If he has 
not really loved it, he will not be sorry except 
for the loss of income and of his sense of self- 
importance ; and the general air and tone of the 
obsequies over the end of his work will be that of 
Gounod's Funeral March of a Marionette. But 
this old physician, at the death and burial of his 
loved work, was crying; yet a grand figure he 
was : and the whole place was deferential with 
tender and admiring respect, and hundreds of 
kind hearts put up the shutters of sympathy and 
pity. Disabled from service, he drew a pension, 
not in money but in peace of mind, in a clear 
conscience, in a name honored far and wide, in 
love, faith and hope, and in a. shrewd and mellow 
wisdom. All these were rewards of faithful work. 
In his retirement he attained something of the 
courage of a soldier and the patience of a saint. 
In the University of Old Age, that grim seat of 
desperate learning, he finished his education and 
took his degree. Dr. Paget's picture befits, as 
well, the old age of a minister who ha^ wor- 
shiped his God-given work. 

In his farewell address to the General Con- 
ference of the Japan Methodist Church at Tokyo 
in 1907, Dr. Goucher said : "It will not be given 
to all of us to do some great thing; but if we 
are lowly in heart and full of God's spirit, we 
may teach some infant life, we may move some 



344 THE OPEN FIRE 

youth to such purpose as to bring him a vision 
of God so that when we are gone and forgotten 
his life shall be a tower of strength and he shall 
accomplish a thousandfold more than we could 
do.'' 

We are told that a teacher once gave to his 
students this parable of the Holy Shadow : 

"Long, long ago there lived a saint so good 
that the astonished angels came down from 
heaven to see how a mortal could be so godly. 
He simply went about his daily life, diffusing 
virtue as the star diffuses light and the flower 
perfume without even being aware of it. Two 
words summed up his day: he gave, he forgave. 
Yet these words never fell from his lips; they 
were expressed in his ready smile, in his kind- 
ness, forbearance, and charity. 

"The angels said to God : ^O Lord, grant him 
the gift of miracles!' God replied: *I consent; 
ask him what he wishes.' 

"So they said to the saint: ^Should you like 
the touch of your hands to heal the sick?' ^No,' 
answered the saint, 'I would rather God should 
do that.' ^Should you like to become a model 
of patience, attracting men by the luster of your 
virtues?' *No,' replied the saint; *if men should 
become attached to me, they might be estranged 
from God.' ^What do you desire, then?' cried 
the angels. ^What can I wish for?' asked the 
saint, smiling. *That God give me his grace; and 
with that shall I not have everything?' 



HUMILITY 345 

"But the angels insisted : *You must ask for a 
miracle, or one will be forced upon you/ *Very 
well then/ replied the saint; 4et this be the 
miracle — that I may do a great deal of good 
without ever knowing it.' 

"The angels were greatly perplexed. They 
took counsel together, and resolved upon this 
plan. Every time the saint's shadow should fall 
behind him or at either side, so that he could not 
see it, the shadow should have the power to cure 
disease and soothe pain and comfort sorrow. 

"And so it came to pass. When the saint 
walked along, his shadow, thrown on the ground 
on either side or behind him, made arid paths 
green, caused withered plants to bloom, gave 
clear water to dried-up brooks, fresh color to the 
faces of pale little children, and joy to unhappy 
mothers. 

"But the saint simply went about his daily 
life, diffusing virtue as the star diffuses light 
and the flower perfume without ever being aware 
of it. And the people, respecting his humility, 
followed him silently, never speaking to him 
about his miracles. Little by little they even 
came to forget his name, and called him only 
^The Holy Shadow.' " 

The man had lost himself in his work. This is 
an ideal not beyond the reach of common men 
like us, if we are willing so to submerge ourselves. 
Words written once before return to memory 
here : When a man learns that he himself is of 



346 THE OPEN FIRE 

no account, that his God-given work is the all- 
important thing, and buries himself in it, then 
for the first he ceases to be a nuisance and be- 
gins to be of use. Then he is getting ready for 
the day when he shall render his account with 
joy and not with grief, saying: "Master, behold 
my sheaves." 



